This Software contains two main pieces:

1. mod_tile: An Apache 2 module to deliver map tiles.
2. renderd: A daemon that renders map tiles using mapnik.

Together they efficiently render and serve raster map tiles for example to use within a slippy map. The two consist of the classic raster tile stack from OpenStreetMap.org.

As an alternative to renderd its drop-in replacement Tirex can be used in combination with mod_tile.

• GNU/Linux Operating System (works best on Debian or Ubuntu)
• Apache 2 HTTP webserver
• Mapnik
• Cairo 2D graphics library
• Curl library (SSL variant)
• Iniparser library
• GLib library

Starting from the following operation systems and their versions:

• Debian 11 (Bullseye)
• Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo)

the software and all dependencies can be installed simply with:

$ apt install libapache2-mod-tile renderd

These packages for Debian and Ubuntu are being maintained by the Debian GIS Team in the respective repository.

You may want to compile this software for developing on it or when using on operating systems this is not being packaged for. On Debian or Ubuntu systems the following packages are needed to start compiling. On other systems the name of the libary might differ slightly.

$ apt install build-essential \
    autoconf \
    apache2-dev \
    libcairo2-dev \
    libcurl4-gnutls-dev \
    libglib2.0-dev \
    libiniparser-dev \
    libmapnik-dev

(You may install more and optional dependencies in order to add functionality to renderd)

Once the dependencies are installed you can compile and install mod_tile and renderd:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo make install-mod_tile

Be aware that you have to add configuration files that are adjusted to your environment before you can run it all.

After you either copiled the software yourself or installed the software packages, you can continue with the configuration. Here we assume that you have installed mod_tile using packages from Debian/Ubuntu. If you compiled from source you need to place debian-style configuration files at the relevant locations to use the Debian helper scripts a2enmod/a2enconf, or manually create apache configuration.

For your convenience example configuration files are located in the etc directory of this repository.

A very basic example-map and data can be found in the example-map directory. For a simple test copy it over to /var/www/example-map.

Copy the configuration files to their place:

$ cp examples/config/renderd.conf.dist /etc/renderd.conf
$ cp examples/config/apache2/renderd.conf.dist /etc/apache2/conf-available/renderd.conf
$ cp examples/config/apache2/renderd-example-map.conf.dist /etc/apache2/conf-available/renderd-example-map.conf

Enable the configuration:

$ sudo a2enmod tile
$ sudo a2enconf renderd
$ sudo a2enconf renderd-example-map

Restart apache2:

$ sudo a2enmod tile
$ sudo a2enconf renderd

And run the rendering daemon

$ renderd -f

Make sure the /var/cache/renderd/tiles directory is writable by the user running the renderd process.

Try loading a tile in your browser, e.g.

http://localhost/renderd-example/tiles/0/0/0.png

You may edit /etc/renderd.conf to indicate the location of your mapnik style sheet and the uri you wish to use to access it. You may configure up to 10 (by default) mapnik style sheets - simply give each section a unique name and enter the uri and style sheet path.

The render daemon should have produce a message like:

Got incoming connection, fd 7, number 1 Render fd(7) xml(Default), z(0), x(0), y(0)

The disk should start thrashing as Mapnik tries to pull in data for the first time. After a few seconds you'll probably see a 404 error. Wait for the disk activity to cease and then reload the tile. With a bit of luck you should see a tile of the world in your browser window.

If this fails to happen check the http error log. You can increase the level of debugging using the LogLevel apache directive. If no log messages are shown check that you are accessing the correct virtual host - the new version of mod_tile is only installed on a single host by default. To install on multiple hosts either use ServerAlias or use the LoadTileConfigFile in each virtual host.

For an OSM type setup, OSM map data imported into PostgreSQL using osm2pgsql is needed. Together with the Mapnik renderer along with the OSM.xml file and map symbols, world_boundaries shapefiles.

The rendering is implemented in a multithreaded process called renderd which opens either a unix or tcp socket and listens for requests to render tiles. It uses Mapnik to render tiles using the rendering rules defined in the configuration file /etc/renderd.conf. Its configuration also allows to specify the number of rendering threads.

The render daemon implements a queuing mechanism with multiple priority levels to provide an as up-to-date viewing experience given the available rendering resources. The highest priority is for on the fly rendering of tiles not yet in the tile cache, two priority levels for re-rendering out of date tiles on the fly and two background batch rendering queues. The on the fly rendering queues are limited to a short 32 metatile size to minimize latency. The size of the main background queue is determined at compile time, see: render_config.h

An Apache module called mod_tile enhances the regular Apache file serving mechanisms to provide:

1) When tiles have expired it requests the rendering daemon to render (or re-render) the tile.

2. Remapping of the file path to the hashed layout

3) Prioritizes rendering requests depending on the available resources on the server and how out of date they are.

4) Use tile storage other than a plain posix file system. e.g it can store tiles in a ceph object store, or proxy them from another tile server.

5) Tile expiry. It estimates when the tile is next likely to be rendered and adds the appropriate HTTP cache expiry headers. This is a configurable heuristic.

To avoid problems with directories becoming too large and to avoid too many tiny files. Mod_tile / renderd store the rendered tiles in "meta tiles" in a special hashed directory structure. These combine 8x8 actual tiles into a single metatile file. This is a more efficient use of disk space and inodes. For example, many sea tiles are 103 bytes long. In the old scheme a meta tile of blank sea tiles would take 64 inodes of 4kB each, a total of 256kB. In this optimized scheme it needs a single file of about 7kB. The metatiles are then stored in the following directory structure: /[base_dir]/[TileSetName]/[Z]/[xxxxyyyy]/[xxxxyyyy]/[xxxxyyyy]/[xxxxyyyy]/[xxxxyyyy].png Where base_dir is a configurable base path for all tiles. TileSetName is the name of the style sheet rendered. Z is the zoom level. [xxxxyyyy] is an 8 bit number, with the first 4 bits taken from the x coordinate and the second 4 bits taken from the y coordinate. This attempts to cluster 16x16 square of tiles together into a single sub directory for more efficient access patterns.

Apache serves the files as if they were present under "/[TileSetName]/Z/X/Y.png" with the path being converted automatically.

mod_tile is designed for high performance tile serving. If the underlying disk system allows it, it can easily provide > 10k tiles/s on a single serve.

Rendering performance is mostly dependent on mapnik and postgis performance, however renderd tries to make sure it uses underlying hardware as efficiently as possible and scales well on multi core systems. Renderd also provides built-in features to scale to multi server rendering set-ups.

Copyright (c) 2007 - 2021 by mod_tile contributors (see AUTHORS)

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

See the COPYING for the full license text.