[OSM-talk] Installing your own tileserver on Ubuntu

Kai Krueger kakrueger at gmail.com
Sun Oct 9 23:13:31 BST 2011


Hello everyone,

with the recent need to crack down on tile scrapers and apps to not over
tax the main OSM tileservers and hosting, there has been a lot of talk
trying to convince people to set up their own tileserver.

Although that is of cause by far not the only hurdle to set up your own
tileserver, one barrier is perhaps the perceived complicated procedure
to set up all the elements necessary. Although there are a number of
decent howtos already available on the wiki (perhaps even to many, each
containing slightly different advice...), it is perhaps still more
effort than people want to get into.

In the hope to make this process even simpler, I have created a bunch of
packages for Ubuntu containing all the necessary software, as well as
glue packages to deal with the necessary setup and interaction between
the different components.

The packages aren't perfect yet, but hopefully sufficiently helpful
already to be of use to others who are interested in playing around with
their own tileserver.

A simple standard tileserver can now be setup in 5 commands in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kakrueger/openstreetmap
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-tile
wget http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/north-america/us/colorado.osm.pbf
osm2pgsql -C 1500 colorado.osm.pbf
sudo /etc/init.d/renderd restart

At the end you should have a working tileserver based on mod_tile and
renderd with the standerd OSM-mapnik stylesheet.

You can test it out by opening the installed slippymap at
http://localhost/osm/slippymap.html

You will of cause want to replace the above lines with the downloading
and importing of an extract with the extract you care about.

Although for smaller areas hardware requirements aren't too bad, they
quickly go up beyond what can be handled by a standard desktop computer.
My rough guestimate of what a typical desktop / laptop can handle is
about an extract of 100 - 300 Mb (no more than an hours worth of
import). This covers most of the US and German states, as well as many
of the other less densely mapped countries.

If you are more serious about your tileserver, you will need to tune the
various configuration settings, but just to play around and for personal
use, the default settings should work reasonable.

More information can be found on yet another wiki-page... (
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ubuntu_tile_server )

Any comments or feedback are welcome,

Kai



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