Hosting tiles on Windows

Hello,

For our project, we’d like to be able to serve OSM tiles on our own (preferrably windows) server. Basically, we would like to be able to host the ‘MapOf’ call (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/MapOf). So we don’t want a map including zoom & pan controls. We just want the imagery.

First of all, i’m not certain what we need for that. It seems to be a combination of Tiles@Home (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tiles@home/Server_install_guide) and some tile-generator, such as the Kosmos tile server (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Kosmos_Tile_Map_Server) or by following this page: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Creating_your_own_tiles.

And, finally, does anybody have experience getting this to run on Windows?

Many thanks in advance for any input.

Well the MapOf thing is a pretty simple script which performs tile stitching. There are several other tools doing the same. I’ve only ever run BigMap myself. This does work on windows. It’s easy to get something like that up and running.

…That leads onto the next question, where do you want to get the tiles from? If you want the whole thing running on your server self-contained, then getting the tiles from tile.openstreetmap.org would be cheating (We also have a Tile Usage Policy and generally encourage people to install their own tile servers rather than hitting ours)

BUT if you’re going to the trouble of installing Rendering Software for a tile service, you may as well skip the tile stitching step, and install rendering software which will give you a map image centred on a requested lat & lon. Many of the renderers will do this.

Mapnik comes with a script “generate_image.py” which generates a single image for a given bounding box. It can be run on windows, but might be a pain to get working (it’s pretty painful to get working on linux!)

Kosmos could be a good approach. It runs on windows. To make a map service you’d probably be looking at the console command line options. You might be better off looking at Maperitive, the newer version of Kosmos, which I believe is offering improved command line use.

The Tiles@home/Server_install_guide is of no interest to you. I’ve added a section at the top of that page to explain why. Basically it doesn’t do what you might think it does.

Hi,

Maperitive currently doesn’t do tiles, but this will be implemented in the near future. And everything is/will be scriptable, so you’ll be able to run it from the command line.

But if I understand correctly you don’t really need a tile service, you only need a bitmap generator. Maperitive already does that (it can even generate georeferencing sidecar files like KML, OziExplorer MAP and world file): http://maperitive.net/docs/manual/Commands/ExportBitmap.html

The only thing is that you can only work on OSM files and they need to be loaded into memory as a whole, so there’s a limit of how large an area you can cover. The maximum I was able to work with on my machine was 70 MB .osm.bz2 file.