Importing shape files using shp2pgsql

ESRI shapefile (SHP) is still the most common exchange format for sharing GIS data. The format itself is made of a few files such as SHP, SHX, DBF, andPRJ, where the first three are the required files and the file with projection information is not obligatory.

The standard PostGIS tool for loading shapefiles is shp2pgsql - you will find it in the bin folder of your postgres installation. shp2pgsql is a command-line utility that can either extract the shapefile data into SQL or pipe the output directly into psql (we'll see both approaches). shp2pgsql also has a GUI version that can be accessed directly in PgAdmin.

In this example, we'll use some NaturalEarth shapefiles we downloaded earlier. We will import the coastlines shapefile using the CMD version of shp2pgsql and then we'll add land masses using the GUI version.