SAGA Next Gen processing provider is offline

[florisvdh]

Not sure what happened, but the repo https://github.com/north-road/qgis-processing-saga-nextgen has disappeared, from where the 'Processing SAGA NextGen provider' QGIS plugin was downloaded into the R-CMD-check GHA Ubuntu workflows.

• This currently makes all Ubuntu-with-QGIS workflows fail in the qgisprocess repo.
• Further, we should take into account that the plugin is actively used in the Getting started vignette, so this tutorial currently won't build with (new) QGIS installations that miss the SAGA NextGen plugin.

The 'Processing SAGA NextGen provider' plugin is effectively missing from https://plugins.qgis.org.

@nyalldawson should we change our approach?

@jannes-m this might also affect the builds of https://r.geocompx.org.

[JanCaha]

@florisvdh this kind of explains what is going on https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/2026-May/068263.html. Basically, I would not expect this plugin to be available. Best to remove it probably...

[nyalldawson]

@florisvdh yes, I consider that plugin abandoned now -- best to remove all references to it. (There's a chance "someone" from the community may resurrect it, but given the lack of interest shown over the last couple of years I wouldn't hold my breath 😆 )

[florisvdh]

Thanks for the mail-pointer @JanCaha. Thanks @nyalldawson for the clarifications!

Accessing the SAGA algorithms seems more of a challenge from QGIS; below is what I could find if we want to continue using them in the R scripts. Please add your thoughts if easier ways exist from the user perspective.

The latest version of the plugin repo in the Web Archive is from 31 Dec 2025. The README points at a new way of compiling SAGA in order to generate an appropriate QGIS processing provider.

SAGA nowadays comes with an Interface Creator for QGIS. To use it compile SAGA with

-DWITH_DEV_TOOLS:BOOL=ON

and run

saga_cmd dev_tools 7

This matches the documentation found in https://deepwiki.com/saga-gis/saga-gis/5.3-external-platform-integration; it should create a zip-file that can be imported as QGIS plugin.

At least for the Ubuntugis version of SAGA though, I found that it is not compiled with the abovementioned flag, so that the needed dev_tools tool library is missing from the delivered SAGA package. The same appears to apply in the saga-common package in the Ubuntu Noble repositories (directory /usr/share/saga/toolchains).

I believe we cannot expect users to custom-compile SAGA in order to access its algorithms from QGIS, at least not in a 'get started' tutorial for the R package. If there's no other way than the above, then the tutorial needs refactoring in order to no longer rely on SAGA.

[Robinlovelace]

best to remove all references to it

That was my thinking to, even more so after reading this thread, let's move on.

geocompx/geocompr#1182