[OSM-dev] downloading partial tilesets to serve locally

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Tom Lancaster wrote:
> newhanoian.com has been leading an effort to complete the OSM Hanoi map
> recently, and we're at a point where we'd like to use OSM tiles in place of
> our custom Gmaps + tilelayer solution. Since we're in vietnam we'd like to
> download a tileset for Hanoi and the surrounding area and serve it from our
> server rather than rely on tile.openstreetmap.org, which is network-distant.
> 
> I've read a lot of stuff on the wiki, but I don't see how to do this without
> downloading the whole world's tileset. It would seem it's possible as I can
> download data for a limited area to JOSM.

You might suffer from some confusion regarding raw data vs. tiles here. 
You can download the raw data for the whole world from 
planet.openstreetmap.org, or sections thereof from third parties, in 
your case the best bet would probably Cloudmade's country excerpt:

http://downloads.cloudmade.com/asia/vietnam

You can then use a local Mapnik installation 
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapnik) to generate your own tiles.

If you're only after a small area (say, up to one level-10 tile) then 
you can also use the tiles at home software to generate your tiles directly 
from live data (it will download the required bits); tiles at home normally 
uploads the generated tiles to the server but also has a 
"localSlippymap" config option that lets you create tiles on disk. 
Tiles at home is painfully slow compared to Mapnik but a bit easier to set up.

The alternative is downloading ready-made tiles from the tile server, 
but there is no off-the-shelf solution for that; you'd have to write a 
small perl script for that, or if you're technically inclined, just 
install a caching proxy between yourself and the openstreetmap.org and 
surf through all of Hanoi once...

Bye
Frederik