The most common use for OpenStreetMap data is hosting your own map. If you need up to the minute data, the entire world, and high zooms, this requires a dedicated server running renderd+mod_tile or other specialized software that handles requests. On the other hand, if less frequently updated data and low zooms is all that’s needed, it can make more sense to pre-render tiles and serve them off of an existing server as files from disk.
Over the next few posts, I’m going to be walking through step-by-step on how to generate these files, starting with downloading OpenStreetMap data, and ending up with rendered tiles.
- It starts with the planet - downloading OSM the right way
- Add some style - building a stylesheet
- Loading the data - using osm2pgsql
- Installing MapProxy - lots of options, all similar
- Configuring MapProxy
- Seeding tiles
- Optimizing PNGs