[OSM-dev] mod_tile/renderd configuration

[Jochen Topf]

Hi!

I have added some changes to mod_tile/renderd to make it more
configurable at runtime. For details see the subversion log.

While doing this I have run into some issues:

renderd uses a ini style config file and had its own minimal parser that
wasn't flexible enough. I included the iniparser library instead.  This
makes adding config options much easier. I have included the whole code
in SVN (its MIT licensed) to make it easy to use. Just cd into
"iniparser3.0b" and type "make" bevor the building renderd. I hope you
agree with this solution.

renderd and mod_tile both read renderd.conf. On the one hand this
makes things easier, because there is only one place where the list of
map configs is defined. But on the other hand it mixes things between
renderd and mod_tile. I think renderd should be separated as much as
possible from mod_tile. I could imagine some people want to use renderd,
but not mod_tile and instead some other plugin to a different webserver.
Also Apache has its own way of configuring things and for mod_tile we
should use that as much as possible. Added bonus is that you could for
instance configure renderd to know about many different maps and they
would be accessible through different Apache virtual hosts etc.

In the medium term I think the mod_tile config should use Apache's
<Location> section to configure the different URIs and their
corresponding tile locations. I don't know enough about Apache config
yet, to see how to do this, but I can probably figure it out. So I
imagin something like this:

<VirtualHost tile.server.org>
    ...
    <Location /osm>
        ModTileMap osm
        ModTileDir /var/lib/mod_tile/osm
    </Location>

    <Location /cycle>
        ModTileMap cycle
        ModTileDir /var/lib/mod_tile/cycle
    </Location>

</VirtualHost>

mod_tile would know where to look for the (meta-)tiles and would use the
"ModTileMap" to know how to contact renderd, which then has this config:

renderd.conf:
...
[osm]
dir=/var/lib/mod_tile/osm
...

[cycle]
dir=/var/lib/mod_tile/cycle
...

There is no need for mod_tile to read renderd.conf then.

Any comments?

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298