The OSM tile server stack is a collection of programs and libraries that work together to create a tile server. As so often with OpenStreetMap, there are many ways to achieve this goal and nearly all of the components have alternatives that have various specific advantages and disadvantages. This tutorial describes the most standard version that is also used on the main OpenStreetMap.org tile server. It consists of 5 main components: Mod_tile, renderd, mapnik, osm2pgsql and a postgresql/postgis database. Mod_tile is an apache module, that serves cached tiles and decides which tiles need re-rendering – either because they are not yet cached or because they are outdated. Renderd provides a priority queueing system for rendering requests to manage and smooth out the load from rendering requests. Mapnik is the software library that does the actual rendering and is used by renderd. In order to build these components, a variety of dependencies need to be installed first:
sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev subversion git-core tar unzip wget bzip2 build-essential autoconf libtool libxml2-dev libgeos-dev libgeos++-dev libpq-dev libbz2-dev libproj-dev munin-node munin libprotobuf-c0-dev protobuf-c-compiler libfreetype6-dev libpng12-dev libtiff4-dev libicu-dev libgdal-dev libcairo-dev libcairomm-1.0-dev apache2 apache2-dev libagg-dev liblua5.2-dev ttf-unifont lua5.1 liblua5.1-dev libgeotiff-epsg node-carto
On Ubuntu there are pre-packaged versions of both postgis and postgresql, so these can simply be installed via the Ubuntu package manager.
sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib postgis postgresql-9.3-postgis-2.1
Now you need to create a postgis database. The defaults of various programs assume the database is called gis and we will use the same convention in this tutorial, although this is not necessary. Substitute your username for username in the two places below. This should be the username that will render maps with Mapnik.
sudo -u postgres -i
createuser username # answer yes for superuser (although this isn't strictly necessary)
createdb -E UTF8 -O username gis
exit
Create a Unix user for this user, too, choosing a password when prompted:
sudo useradd -m username sudo passwd username
Set up PostGIS on the PostgreSQL database (again, substitute your username for username below):
sudo -u postgres psql \c gis CREATE EXTENSION postgis; ALTER TABLE geometry_columns OWNER TO username; ALTER TABLE spatial_ref_sys OWNER TO username; \q exit
osm2pgsql is under active development and is best compiled from source.
mkdir ~/src cd ~/src git clone git://github.com/openstreetmap/osm2pgsql.git cd osm2pgsql ./autogen.sh ./configure make sudo make install
Next, we need to install the Mapnik library. Mapnik is used to render the OpenStreetMap data into the tiles used for an OpenLayers web map. Build the Mapnik library from source:
cd ~/src git clone git://github.com/mapnik/mapnik cd mapnik git branch 2.2 origin/2.2.x git checkout 2.2 python scons/scons.py configure INPUT_PLUGINS=all OPTIMIZATION=3 SYSTEM_FONTS=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ make sudo make install sudo ldconfig
Verify that Mapnik has been installed correctly:
python >>> import mapnik >>>
If python replies with the second chevron prompt >>> and without errors, then Mapnik library was found by Python. Congratulations! You can leave Python with this command:
>>> quit()
Compile the mod_tile source code:
cd ~/src git clone git://github.com/openstreetmap/mod_tile.git cd mod_tile ./autogen.sh ./configure make sudo make install sudo make install-mod_tile sudo ldconfig