How to run python script for QGIS from outside

Question

I have hundred shape files in a folder. I have following tasks

1. Find out what are the fields in each shapefile
2. If there is no field 'City' in any of the shapefiles I have to add that field in those shapefile.

I can access each layer in python console in QGIS using iface.activeLayer()

But I want to run a stand alone python script which will perform the tasks. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

In my humble opinion, if you want to execute python scripts without the QGIS GUI, you could use the OGR Python API directly.

There's an entire "cookbook" here: https://pcjericks.github.io/py-gdalogr-cookbook/

The official API documentation is here: http://gdal.org/python/

Simple tutorial: http://www.gdal.org/ogr_apitut.html