This is strange, but I was unable to find instruction about importing QGIS layers into PostGIS database with PyQGIS API. The PyQGIS cookbook has the example of exporting layers as .shp-files via
QgsVectorFileWriter.writeAsVectorFormat() function and says that the other other OGR-supported formats are available to use in this function as well. PostGIS is supported by OGR so
people got confused and try to use this function to import data to the PostGIS with no success and have to write generic import functions.
After of couple of hours of searching the internet for the solution I gave up and decided to find the answer the hard way: started to search through the source code for the
DB Manager plugin that has this nice "import layer" feature. It took about 20 minuets to trace down the function that was in charge of the import and it was
QgsVectorLayerImport.importLayer(). But the quest wasn't over yet! The documentation says nothing about provider names that are accepted by this function. "PostgreSQL" would be the obvious name for the provider as it is the name for the PostgeSQL provider in OGR, but it is not the case. I had to go through the source code of DB Manager again and luckily in comments (and there are quite a few of them in DB Manager: I didn't find a single doc-string there) the author wrote that it is "postgres" for the PostgreSQL. UPD: the function to list available providers is QgsProviderRegistry.instance().providerList().
Now here is the very basic example code of importing QGIS layer into PostGIS:
uri = "dbname='test' host=localhost port=5432 user='user' password='password' key=gid type=POINT table=\"public\".\"test\" (geom) sql="
crs = None
# layer - QGIS vector layer
error = QgsVectorLayerImport.importLayer(layer, uri, "postgres", crs, False, False)
if error[0] != 0:
iface.messageBar().pushMessage(u'Error', error[1], QgsMessageBar.CRITICAL, 5)
