Running a map server with Mapnik and TileStache on Ubuntu 16.04
This guide shows the setup of a simple map server with Mapnik 3 and TileStache 1.51.6 using Apache2 on Ubuntu 16.04 Desktop.
Mapnik is a powerful tool for generating maps from geographic data, TileStache a simple vetor and raster tile server for geographic data.
1. Installing Mapnik
sudo apt-get install libmapnik3.0 mapnik-utils python-mapnik
2. Installing TileStache
First we install the dependencies with this 2 commands:
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo apt-get install curl git-core python-setuptools python-dev python-gdal libjpeg8 libjpeg62-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev
Now we get TileStache and install it into /opt folder:
cd /opt sudo curl -O https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py sudo python get-pip.py sudo pip install -U werkzeug sudo pip install -U pyproj sudo pip install -U modestmaps sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so /usr/lib sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so /usr/lib sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so /usr/lib sudo ln -s -T /usr/include/freetype2/ /usr/include/freetype sudo git clone https://github.com/migurski/TileStache.git cd TileStache/ sudo python setup.py install
Now we configure TileStache editing the file /opt/TileStache/tilestache.cfg:
"cache":
{
"name": "Disk",
"path": "/var/www/html/tiles",
"umask": "0000"
}
3. Configuring Apache
Apache module mod_python is dead so we use mod_wsgi to execute python from Apache.
First we create the file tilestache.wsgi on a path Apache can read, for example on /var/www/wsgi:
import os, TileStache
application = TileStache.WSGITileServer('/opt/TileStache/tilestache.cfg')
Next we add WSGI to Apache adding this line to the <VirtualHost *:80> section of the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf:
WSGIScriptAlias /tiles /var/www/wsgi/tilestache.wsgi
No install apache mod_wsgi:
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-wsgi sudo a2enmod wsgi sudo service apache2 restart
4. Putting it all together
Now we create the folder for the tiles and clean up:
sudo mkdir /var/www/html/tiles sudo chmod 777 -R /var/www/html/tiles sudo rm /opt/get-pip.py
No we open the browser with the following URL:
http://localhost/tiles/osm/preview.html
You should see apearing a OSM map tile by tile. All the newly rendered tiles get stored in the folder /var/www/html/tiles. Inside you’ll find tiles in png format ordered zoom level.
Tags: Linux, Mapnik, openlayers, TileStache, tutorial
