OpenStreetMap
Switch2osm "Manually building a tile server" page updated
Posted by SomeoneElse on 18 March 2018 in English.I’ve added a new page to the switch2osm guide: “Manually building a tile server (18.04 LTS)”.
Although Ubuntu 18.04 (“Bionic Beaver”) isn’t released yet, it’s due out fairly soon and daily builds can be downloaded from here. There are actually very few changes from the 16.04 version - mostly just updated versions of software (including some Mapnik fixes). Following these instructions shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours for small areas - the longest period of the setup is waiting for the shapefiles used by the style to download.
As before, the page is designed to be “the least you need to do” to get a rendering server working. As before I also wrote a wiki page which goes into a bit more detail, including other things that you might want to do.
It’s also worth mentioning than there are many more resources available now than there were a couple of years ago - see for example Ircama’s tutorials, and also this guide that covers the setup of an OSM Carto renderer within Docker.
Discussion
Comment from Zverik on 19 March 2018 at 20:31
Thanks for writing and, I believe, testing all of this. I sometimes visit switch2osm just for these instructions. The links you gave are also very valuable, I haven’t seen Ircama’s before.
Do you think at this point the whole instruction should be just “docker up wherever/openstreetmap”? Following the same steps for 4 years seems to be a bit redundant in 2018.
Comment from SomeoneElse on 19 March 2018 at 21:31
It rather depends on what you’re trying to do, I think. If you’re already familiar with Docker etc. and “just want to render some tiles”, then quite possibly. If you’re not, or you want to set up a server to serve custom tiles in an app, or you want to understand more about how everything hangs together, then probably not. The idea behind these guides is that you can follow them with essentially no existing knowledge. The carto docker guide just throws you at this page and expects you to figure out for yourself what you need.
The “obvious bit missing” to me is an equivalent guide for some sort of vector mapping. OpenMapTiles is a whole lot nearer to that than it used to be, but it’s not quite a solution to the same problem.