RustGIS

A fast, free and open-source GIS in pure Rust for mapping, analyzing and sharing geospatial data.
Native on Windows, macOS and Linux, and in your web browser. Your data stays on your machine unless you send it to an AI model you choose, and every action is a command you can script.

Why RustGIS

• Fast and small. One native program, drawn on the GPU, with no runtime to install and no server to run.
• Runs everywhere. The same app on Windows, macOS and Linux, and compiled to WebAssembly at web.rustgis.app with nothing to install.
• Local and private. Your files are read and written on your machine, and nothing is uploaded on its own. The network is used only when you ask for it: web basemaps, plugins, the GeoLibre tools and the AI model you pick, which receives your questions and the data it reads to answer them.
• Everything is a command. Every button in the ribbon is a command with an id. Script it from rustgis-cli, chain it in notebooks and models, use completion in the Script pane, or ask the AI Assistant to run it for you.
• Familiar. A ribbon laid out in the order of the work (Home, Data, Style, Edit, Analyze, View, Publish), Layers and Browser panes, an attribute table, and undo for every change.
• Extensible. Over 1,000 GeoLibre and Whitebox tools for terrain, hydrology, LiDAR and remote sensing, and sandboxed WebAssembly plugins that add commands, tools and ribbon tabs.

A tour

Prefer a video? RustGIS: A Fast, Free GIS That Runs on Your Desktop and in Your Browser walks through the main features, and the Video Tutorials page collects the rest of the playlist.

Symbology and tables. Graduated colours, with the selection synced to the table.	AI Assistant. Ask about your data or tell the map what to do.
Analysis. A tool gallery, the Tools pane and 1,000+ GeoLibre tools.	Rasters. GeoTIFF and COG, with stretch, RGB and shaded-relief styles.
Globe and projections. A 3D globe, Equal Earth, Robinson or any EPSG code.	Web basemaps. XYZ, WMS and vector tiles, and MapLibre styles.
Layouts. Map frames, legends, scale bars, map series and PDF export.	Plugins. Install sandboxed plugins from plugins.rustgis.app.
ModelBuilder. Chain tools on a node canvas and run them in one go.	Web Data. STAC, Overture Maps, NASA and open-data portals, where the map is.
Terrain. Tilt the map and drape it over elevation.	Other worlds. The Moon, Mars and nine more bodies, on their own basemaps.
Extrusion. Stand features up by a field, lit and shaded.	Time Slider. Step dated features and imagery through time.
Dark mode and the View tab's effects, panes and linked views.	Projects. Start blank, from the World Atlas sample, or open a project.

Every screenshot is RustGIS itself, rendered offscreen by cargo run -p rustgis-ui-egui --example ui_shot.

Features

Area	Highlights
Data	GeoJSON, CSV/TSV with x/y columns in other coordinate systems or WKT geometry, Excel and OpenDocument spreadsheets, GeoRSS, LandXML, encoded polylines, Shapefile (zipped too, in the browser as well), GeoPackage, GeoParquet, FlatGeobuf, KML/KMZ (with styles), GPX, GML, MapInfo MIF/MID, OpenStreetMap PBF, TopoJSON, CityJSON, AutoCAD DXF, LiDAR point clouds (LAS, LAZ, COPC) and geotagged photos (large GeoPackage, GeoParquet and FlatGeobuf files, and Shapefiles on the desktop, are read in place), files by their web address, every vector format GDAL reads when it is installed (desktop), Esri File Geodatabases without GDAL (desktop), PostGIS, MySQL, MariaDB and SQL Server tables read live (desktop), and SQL queries and DuckDB databases through DuckDB Spatial when DuckDB is installed (desktop); PMTiles archives (by web address, or a file on the desktop) and MBTiles files; GeoJSON, CSV, GeoPackage (also as a table added to an existing file), GeoParquet, Shapefile, FlatGeobuf, KML/KMZ, GPX and WKT out (GeoPackage and FlatGeobuf not from the web app); standalone tables; reusable connections; Reload Data for linked files (desktop); geocoding (Find Place, address tables); a Data Sources pane (favourites, recent, saved services, a library) and an SQL pane (desktop); supported QGIS and GeoLibre projects and layer styles; layer and map files, styles, templates and packages
Open data	STAC search (Planetary Computer assets), NASA Earthdata imagery and granule search (GeoTIFFs added on the desktop), Hugging Face, Overture Maps, Source Cooperative, OpenStreetMap by area, geoBoundaries, CKAN, Socrata and ArcGIS Hub portals; S3 buckets with signed connections and a bucket browser; a Data Cubes pane with a catalog of cubes for the time slider (added on the desktop)
Rasters	GeoTIFF and cloud-optimised GeoTIFF (any pixel type, tiled or striped, compressed), ASCII grids, Zarr 2 and 3 stores (a variable at a time step, by web address, or folder on the desktop), and JPEG 2000, NetCDF, HDF, ERDAS Imagine and the other rasters GDAL reads when it is installed (desktop); reprojection by EPSG code; Stretch, RGB, Classify, Unique Values, Colormap and Shaded Relief; DRA, band combinations, brightness/contrast/gamma; raster functions, indices, change detection, classification, georeferencing; cloud-optimised GeoTIFF export (desktop); data cubes, point time-series charts (desktop), temporal summaries and trends (Sen's slope, Mann–Kendall); a spectral profile comparing a multiband raster's bands at points
Maps	Multiple maps and layouts per project, renamed and duplicated from the Browser pane; a GPU renderer (beta) with smooth zoom and pan; tilt, rotation, terrain and a 3D globe; maps of the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies; Web Mercator or another projection (Equal Earth, Robinson, Winkel Tripel, polar and regional presets, or a supported projected EPSG or ESRI code); a search box for layers, places and coordinates; UTM and MGRS readouts; an on-map right-click menu (copy the coordinate, quick buffer, viewshed and line of sight); identify pop-ups with links and pictures; bookmarks, extent history, coordinate navigation; five offline basemaps, with borders in 32 worldviews (31 downloaded when chosen)
Web services	WMS, WMTS, WFS, WCS, OGC API Features and Tiles, and ArcGIS REST (FeatureServer, MapServer, ImageServer, VectorTileServer) from their capabilities; CSW catalogue search; sign-in to ArcGIS Online and Enterprise, basic-auth and API-key logins; WMS and WMTS time on the time slider, legends and GetFeatureInfo
Web tiles	XYZ/TMS/WMS raster tiles, Mapbox Vector Tiles and MapLibre styles (sprites, patterns, expressions), cached and fetched in the background
Cartography	Single symbol, unique values (also by expression), graduated colours with seven classification methods and manual breaks, proportional symbols, pie and bar diagrams; symbol size, colour, width and angle, and label text, size, colour and angle, by expression; label classes with SQL queries, straight and curved line placement, installed font families (desktop), scale ranges and annotation; stacked and dashed line strokes, hatch, marker, gradient and shapeburst fills, custom colour ramps and the matplotlib colour maps, symbol levels, reference scales and polygons without fill; masking, display filters, aggregation bins, 2.5D extrusion; graphics and dynamic text
Editing	Create, move, rotate, scale, merge, split and explode features; vertex editing, cut polygons, reshape and trace along an edge; coincident polygon vertices in a layer moved together with Shared Vertices turned on; snapping, templates, elevation, traverse, topology rules; domains, subtypes, attribute rules, contingent values, relationships, archiving; Calculate Field with an expression language and Calculate Geometry in metric or imperial units, from the attribute table; edits saved back to GeoPackage and PostGIS tables (desktop); undo for everything in the project (undoing a save doesn't reverse what was written to the table)
Analysis	Selection by attributes (SQL) and location; Buffer, Near, Clip, Erase, Split, Intersect, Identity, Union, Symmetrical Difference, Update, Summarize Within, Summary Statistics, Pivot Table, Tabulate Intersection, Spatial Join, Zonal Statistics, Kernel Density, A5 grids; viewshed, line of sight, IDW, ordinary kriging, shortest path, suitability modelling; tools in the background on the desktop with progress and Cancel, many on several cores, and in batches; ModelBuilder on a node canvas, scripts with command, parameter and value completion, and history copied as code; 1,000+ GeoLibre and Whitebox raster, vector, LiDAR, hydrology and terrain tools
Data management	Dissolve, Merge and Join Field; geometry conversions (feature to point, feature vertices to points, points along lines, polygon to line, split line at vertices, unsplit line, feature envelope to polygon, XY table to point) and minimum bounding geometry; check and repair geometry
Imagery	Ortho and reality mapping, pixel classification (k-means, minimum distance, a trainable neural network), mensuration, hosted imagery tiles
Layouts and reports	Page layouts with map frames, legends, scale bars, grids and map series; publication sheets and figures in one command, format panes, guides, snapping and element locks; reports with groups, statistics, charts and subreports; vector PDF and SVG, and GeoPDF with supported map frames georeferenced; presentations (HTML slideshow, PDF); notebooks (Jupyter in and out)
Sharing	PNG export at up to 600 DPI; PDF; web map pages, OGC API Features collections, MapLibre styles, glTF and STL scenes, vector and raster PMTiles, the map view as a GeoTIFF placed on the ground (desktop), locators; the web app embedded in a page (?embed); project, map and mobile map packages; offline areas with sync
AI Assistant	Ask about your data or tell the map what to do in plain language, with Anthropic, OpenAI (a key, or your ChatGPT plan by signing in on the desktop or command line), Gemini, OpenRouter, Requesty, TrustedRouter, Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible model; also rustgis-cli ask, and an MCP server (rustgis-cli mcp) for Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code and other agents; skills; on the desktop, agents such as Claude Code and Codex started from the app, and external AI clients driving the open app; keys optionally remembered in the system keychain on the desktop (in the web app, unencrypted in the browser's storage)
Plugins	Sandboxed WebAssembly plugins add commands, tools and ribbon tabs; install them from plugins.rustgis.app on the desktop, command line and web. Process plugins (desktop and command line) run as programs (with Python environments RustGIS makes), in the background or for the whole session; panels offer trees, dropdowns, date pickers and sliders
Python	The rustgis package on PyPI: the engine in-process, rustgis.Map in Jupyter and rustgis.qt.MapWidget in Qt applications
Interface	Layers, Browser and Data Sources panes as tabs, command search (Ctrl+K), keyboard shortcuts, dark mode, custom themes (desktop) and an interface scale, a customizable ribbon and Quick Access Toolbar, linked side-by-side maps, a History pane of tool runs and the session log, autosave and crash recovery (desktop), Check for Updates (desktop), 21 languages

(desktop) marks what the web app doesn't do; most of these also work from the command line and Python.

The user guide covers each area in detail, Comparison sets RustGIS beside GeoLibre, QGIS and ArcGIS, and ROADMAP.md lists what's next.

Get RustGIS

• Web app: open web.rustgis.app. The same ribbon and tools, with the browser's file picker for data and projects, and downloads for Save and Export.
• Desktop: download the app for Windows, macOS or Linux from downloads.rustgis.app or the latest release (see Installation for the files and first-run notes).
• Microsoft Store: get RustGIS from the Microsoft Store on Windows 10 and 11, which installs it in one click and keeps it up to date.
• Package managers: winget install OpenGeos.RustGIS, brew install --cask rustgis (macOS and Linux), yay -S rustgis-bin (AUR), or sudo dnf copr enable giswqs/rustgis && sudo dnf install rustgis (Fedora).
• From source: cargo run --release -p rustgis (Rust 1.90 or later).

Quick start

cargo run --release -p rustgis                       # the desktop app with the World Atlas sample
cargo run --release -p rustgis -- data.geojson       # open data (or a .rgis project)

Command line: every ribbon action is a command with an id.

rustgis-cli commands                                 # all command ids and parameters
rustgis-cli render countries.geojson map.png --basemap ocean
rustgis-cli run --sample \
  --cmd 'gp.run={"tool":"countPoints","params":{"polygons":"Countries","points":"Cities"}}' \
  --cmd 'layer.symbology={"layer":"Countries_Summarize","type":"graduated","field":"point_count"}' \
  --cmd 'share.exportMap={"path":"out.png","dpi":192}' --save atlas.rgis
rustgis-cli ask --sample "Which 5 countries have the largest GDP?"
claude mcp add rustgis -- rustgis-cli mcp --sample   # RustGIS as an MCP server for AI agents

See Command Line for more.

Python: the same engine and commands in-process (pip install rustgis), and the app itself in a Jupyter notebook.

import rustgis
s = rustgis.Session(sample=True)
s.run("gp.run", tool="buffer", params={"input": "Cities", "distance": 100})
s.to_png("map.png")
gdf = s.layer("Cities_Buffer").to_geopandas()

See Python and the getting-started notebook (open in Colab).

Architecture

Layered crates, each depending only on the ones below it:

Layer	Crate	Job
L0	rustgis-geom	coordinates, extents, Web Mercator, geodesic distance/area, scale
L1	rustgis-data	features and typed attributes; GeoJSON, CSV, Shapefile, KML, GPX and more; GeoPackage, GeoParquet, FlatGeobuf, LiDAR, PostGIS and MySQL providers; GDAL formats and DuckDB queries through their programs; SQL where clauses; rasters (GeoTIFF, ASCII grid, Zarr) and their coordinate systems
L2	rustgis-map, rustgis-analysis	layers, symbology, labeling, camera, basemaps; geoprocessing (on geo)
L2	rustgis-tiles	web map tiles: XYZ/TMS/WMS, Mapbox Vector Tiles, PMTiles and MBTiles archives, MapLibre styles, the tile cache
L3	rustgis-render	tiny-skia renderer, label placement, PNG export, fonts
L3	rustgis-plugins	sandboxed WebAssembly plugins and the plugin registry
L3	rustgis-geolibre	the GeoLibre tool suite as geoprocessing tools
L4	rustgis-engine	session, undo, command registry, sample project
L5	rustgis-assistant	the AI Assistant: a chat agent that acts through commands
L6	rustgis-ui-egui	the ribbon front end (swappable)
apps	rustgis, rustgis-cli, rustgis-web, rustgis-python	desktop, command line, browser (WebAssembly), the rustgis Python package

cargo xtask ci runs formatting, clippy, the tests and the layering check. Contributor and agent notes: AGENTS.md.

Sponsor

RustGIS is free and open source, and stays that way. If it is useful to you or your team, sponsorship is the most direct way to keep development, hosting and cross-platform distribution going.

• GitHub Sponsors: monthly or one-time, billed through your GitHub account.
• Buy Me a Coffee: a quick one-off contribution, no account required.

See the Become a Sponsor page for what sponsorship supports and for other, free ways to help.

Citation

If you use RustGIS in your work, please cite it. RustGIS is archived on Zenodo, which mints a DOI for every release. The concept DOI below always resolves to the latest version.

Wu, Q., Rincón Albarracín, J. G., Filho, E., Hofbauer, D., Fitzgerald, M., & Strebel, D. (2026). RustGIS: A fast, free and open-source GIS in pure Rust for mapping, analyzing and sharing geospatial data. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23633281

You can also use GitHub's "Cite this repository" button (which reads CITATION.cff) to copy a ready-made APA or BibTeX entry. See the How to Cite page for more formats.

Star History

Acknowledgements

RustGIS builds on the work of many projects and their authors: QGIS, ArcGIS Pro and GDAL, the GIS it is measured against; MapLibre and PROJ; the GeoLibre tool suite, after John Lindsay's WhiteboxTools; OpenFreeMap for vector basemaps; Natural Earth, OpenStreetMap, Overture Maps and the EPSG dataset; and the Rust crates it is made of, among them egui, wgpu, tiny-skia, geo, proj4rs, tiff, Apache Arrow and Parquet, rusqlite and wasmi. See the acknowledgements for the full list, and ATTRIBUTION.md for every asset's source and licence.

Disclaimer

RustGIS is primarily built with Claude Opus 5.5, an AI model by Anthropic, working under human direction and review. Its results are tested, but check them for your own use, and please report anything that looks wrong.

License and credits

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Sample data from Natural Earth (public domain).