Maps-Tiles

This repository contains:

• maps-ox/: source files for map tiles (i.e. stylesheets)
• data/: GeoJSON files containing transformed OxPoints data
• puppet/: puppet files to provision a VM exposing TileMill
• Vagrantfile to start a local VM using Vagrant

Export with standalone maps app

As of August 2016, the tilemill server wasn't operational and attempts to restore it haven't been successful. Instead, the following method can be used to generate the map tiles manually on a local machine (OSX/Ubuntu).

1. Install tilemill: https://github.com/tilemill-project/tilemill
2. Copy the maps-ox folder from the root of this repository to ~/Documents/MapBox/project. Tilemill will then recognise it as a project.
3. Download the following .zip files:
   • http://mapbox-geodata.s3.amazonaws.com/natural-earth-1.3.0/physical/10m-land.zip
   • http://tilemill-data.s3.amazonaws.com/osm/coastline-good.zip
   • http://tilemill-data.s3.amazonaws.com/osm/shoreline_300.zip
4. These zip files are among several Datasources in maps-ox/project.mml, which defines the tilemill project. You will need to edit the filepaths in these datasources to point correctly to the zip files (note: somewhere the user you run tilemill as can access).
5. Run Docker container for postgis database from the root of this project

docker-compose up

6. Trigger osm import to postgis database

docker exec -it mapstiles_pg_1 /bin/bash /srv/fetch_osm.sh

Enter password 'docker' when prompted

7. Modify project.mml to amend connection details for each gis Datasource as follows. If "docker-default" doesn't work as a host value then use the IP address of the docker container mapstiles_pg_1 (or localhost on a Mac).

    "dbname": "gis",
    "host": "docker-default",
    "port": "5432",
    "user": "docker",
    "password": "docker",

8. Open project in tilemill
9. If necessary amend pg_hba.conf to allow incoming connections from tilemill. The docker container output will show an error if this is needed.
10. At this point the map should show up with appropriate appearance and labels etc. The tiles can be exported according to the instructions below.

## Vagrant VM

Run vagrant up from the root of the repository. You can access TileMill at http://localhost:8088 (port forwarded).

You should run fab vm init the first time to setup some permissions on filestystem and database for the user vagrant.

Remote server

TileMill UI is served on port 80, tiles are served on port 8080.

To run Fabric commands you need to set up two environment variables:

• MAPS_HOST (hostname of the server to SSH)
• MAPS_USER (your user name on the server).

Use the following syntax to set an environment variable:

export NAME=VALUE

Authentication for TileMill web interface

It is using HTTP Basic Auth, default username/password are: user / pass.

Initial setup for a new user

Once logged-in to the server, you should add your .gitconfig to the root of your user directory.

Also run the following Fabric command to "attach" your user to PostGIS:

fab server init

## Update OpenStreetMap data

You need Fabric to run commands on the server (using a virtualenv, it is recommended to pip install -r requirements.txt).

Run the following command to download the latest dump from OpenStreetMap and populate PostGIS with it:

fab server update_osm

Important note: the script will ask for your password, and it is expected that you have sudo access to the machine. See fabfile.py for more information.

Update OxPoints data

Follow the process in the directory data/ and make sure that you commit and push the updated GeoJSON files.

SSH into the Tilemill server and go to the git repository at /srv/tilemill/maps-tiles, make sure you are on the correct branch and fetch the latest changes (git pull).

Workflow for working with Tilemill and git

After having done some changes, you should run the following command to copy the project files from the workspace (TileMill) to the git repository:

fab server tilemill_to_git

Using SSH, navigate to /srv/tilemill/maps-tiles to navigate to the git repository; you can now use all the git commands (i.e. commit, branch etc)

Using git / GitHub with HTTPS

You will notice fairly quickly that you will need to enter your username/password quite often when doing git push and git pull, that is because we are using HTTPS, various techniques exist to reduce this issue: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5343068/is-there-a-way-to-skip-password-typing-when-using-https-github

Exporting tiles from TileMill

Use the web interface to export in MBTiles format. Default parameters are fine.

Once the export is done ("process exited"...), go to /usr/share/mapbox/export and scp the most recent maps-ox.mbtiles file (which can be suffixed with a random string if there are multiple exports) to your machine. For example:

scp myusername@tilemill.mydomain:/usr/share/mapbox/export/maps-ox.mbtiles .

Deploying tiles

Deploying the tiles to a server is done by running the Fabric command:

fab tiles deploy_tiles:/local/path/to.mbtiles

It expects en environment variable TILES_HOST containing host:port, your public SSH key should have been deployed to /srv/tiles/.ssh/authorized_keys first.

It can be easier to do this process manually now with the following steps: scp ./local-tiles.mbtiles tiles@maps-tiles.oucs.ox.ac.uk:/srv/tiles/tiles.mbtiles ssh mapstiles@129.67.241.175 mb-util /srv/tiles/tiles.mbtiles /srv/tiles/tiles-YYYYMMHHMM rm -f /srv/tiles/www ln -s /srv/tiles/tiles-YYYYMMHHMM /srv/tiles/www

Similar projects

Here's a list of similar projects to run TileMill on a server:

• https://github.com/perrygeo/vagrant-webmaps
• https://github.com/miccolis/aws-tilemill