Getting GRASS plugin working in QGIS for Windows?

I've installed QGIS 2.16.3-1 on Windows 10 via the OSGeo4W 64-bit installer and also selected the following packages:

• grass (7.0.5-1)


• qgis-grass-plugin7 (2.16.3-1)


• qgis-grass-plugin-common (2.16.3-1)

I can't find the GRASS plugin in the list of plugins at Plugins > Manage and Install Plugins > Installed (panel)

And the QGIS Browser can see the grass location and mapset folder, but doesn't have the GRASS icon like it does in Linux. So layers can't be added to the map. I guess that means that the gdal-grass plugin is unavailable as well.

I tried launching QGIS Desktop 2.16.3 with GRASS 7.0.4 but get the same results as above. Maybe the GRASS version mismatch is a problem or just a shortcut name typo.

Answer

I have this problem with the 64bit version. Grass 7.0.5 is a recent release, like less than a week. QGIS and the GRASS 7 plugin haven't been updated to catch up - e.g. if you look at the batch file launchers in \bin you'll see they all refer to 7.0.4.

What you need to do is launch the OSGeo4W setup, go to Advanced Install, navigate to the package list, and roll it back to 7.0.4. Until the rest of the package is updated, you should only install 7.0.5 if you're going to use it as a standalone app.

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You can also uninstall qgis, qgis-grass-plugin7, qgis-grass-plugin6, qgis-grass-plugin-common and install qgis-rel-dev instead which will also install GRASS 7 because it has the grass plugin bundled up with it.

Then launch QGIS Desktop x.x.x with GRASS x.x.x (Nightly) from the start menu.

This is a nightly build of the release branch for QGIS with current patches and fixes.