Tile Server (2011)

The Planimate Map object enables the use of tiled map data in models. These notes describe the setup of a map tile web server which can be used with Planimate or other open Street Maps projects.

The bulk of the install is described here and credit to the author for this guide, which gets you from a bare linux install to locally creating map tiles.

Setting up the VM

Start by creating a new VM, pointing it to a Ubuntu 10.04 ISO (ubuntu-10.04-server-amd64.iso). I selected 3.5GHz RAM, 100GB HDD size and bridged networking. Selected defaults for the rest. In a few minutes you'll be at a linux login. Note this was a first test, only for the Australia region. I'll see how it copes with the whole world when I get round to downloading some 8GB of data.

Installing PostGIS, MapNik

Follow the guide. Its useful to ssh in and copy/paste in a line at a time. I used PUTTY as the terminal. The guide is pretty well spot on except these:

I found I had to intsall 'unzip', might as well do that first

sudo apt-get install unzip

Leter in the guide it says to do this:

psql -f /usr/share/postgresql/8.4/contrib/postgis-1.5/postgis.sql -d gis

This directory didn't exist so instead I did:

psql -f /usr/share/postgresql/8.4/contrib/postgis.sql -d gis

If you read the article's comments, you'll find this is how it used to be.

This will get you to generating a map from the command line.