SpatiaLite Quick Start

SpatiaLite doesn’t need to be installed [1], just get SpatiaLite and unpack it in – for example – ~/apps (tested on Ubuntu 9.4):
~$ mkdir apps ~$ cd apps ~/apps$ wget http://www.gaia-gis.it/spatialite/spatialite-tools-linux-x86-2.3.1.tar.gz ~/apps$ tar xvfz spatialite-tools-linux-x86-2.3.1.tar.gz
Now you should be able to run it. Let’s create a test database:
~/apps$ cd ~/temp ~/temp$ ~/apps/spatialite-tools-linux-x86-2.3.1/bin/spatialite testdb.sqlite
Then we have to initialize the new database with some metadata. We need a script called init_spatialite-2.3.sql (get it from http://www.gaia-gis.it/spatialite-2.3.1/resources.html). It will create the tables “geometry_columns” and “spatial_ref_sys”.
spatialite> .read '~/init_spatialite-2.3.sql' ASCII
For testing purposes, we’ll now load a shapefile into our new database. I used a Teleatlas street graph (attribute encoding iso-8859-15) and created a “streets” table:
spatialite> .loadshp ~/maps/streetgraph streets iso-8859-15
Finally, we register the geometry columns … pretty similar to PostGIS:
spatialite> UPDATE streets SET Geometry = SetSrid(Geometry,4326); spatialite> SELECT RecoverGeometryColumn('streets','Geometry',4326,'LINESTRING',2);
Done! That’s it. Now we can view our test data in QGIS. For a longer Tutorial check http://www.gaia-gis.it/spatialite/spatialite-tutorial-2.3.1.html