Mapserver on Linux

How I built MapServer for CDS

Installation

The INSTALL file has this text in it: "Visit http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ for full documentation and installation instructions." It took me a good 30 minutes to find any useful documentation at the UMN site!

Look in their MapServerWiki. Here is a doc on MapServerCompilation

Server

I built PHP/Mapscript to run under Apache 2.0.54 on a system based on Trustix Linux 2.2. (This happens to be the system most readily available at the moment.) I have TSL 2.2 or 3.0 on all my servers.

For performance reasons I want to use PHP as a loadable module so I am building PHP/Mapscript.

Relevant installed packages with TSL 2.2 include

Apache 2.0.54 web server -- installed from apache TSL package

GD 2.0.33 graphics library -- installed from gd and gd-devel TSL packages

zlib conpression library -- zlib and zlib-devel packages

PHP

As mentioned above I have to build PHP 4.4.0 Building requires the TSL packages: flex, gcc, make, glibc-devel; generally these are required to build most anything.

The options I used for the PHP configure script are:

./configure \
       --with-apxs2 \
       --with-pear \
       --with-gd --enable-gd-imgstrttf --with-freetype-dir=/usr \
       --with-png-dir=/usr \
       --with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6 \    this is probably not needed
       --enable-gd-native-ttf \
       --with-zlib \
       --with-gettext \
       --with-xml \
       --with-mysql   only if you want builtin mysql support

Then the usual

 make
 su
 make install

The 'make install' step will modify your httpd.conf file to include the module but you have to restart apache completely ('apachectl restart' will not work.)

 apachectl stop
 apachectl restart

MapServer supporting cast of characters

Projections

Projection transforms are handled by PROJ which is currently at revision 4.4.9

Proj includes a library for performing respective forward and inverse transformation of cartographic data to or from cartesian data with a wide range of selectable projection functions.

Once you've plowed through the PHP build, it's almost not worth trying to find a pre-built package. You do need the g++ compiler which is in the gcc-c++-devel package. Then it's just a matter of downloading and unpacking the proj tar file and doing the traditional

 ./configure
 make
 su
 make install

Raster and vector file support

GDAL is for raster files, OGR is for vector files.

GDAL is the "Geospatial Data Abstraction Library". GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats.

Again, there might be a gdal pre-built package for TSL but what the heck, it is easy to build from sources, you get the latest version that way, and you don't waste time messing around with figuring out which Redhat version works on TSL.

As of today version 1.3.0 is available from http://www.gdal.org/dl/

The OGR library is a subcomponent of GDAL so you don't need to worry about it if you install GDAL. The OGR Simple Features Library allows MapServer users to display several types of vector data files in their native formats. For example, MapInfo Mid/Mif and TAB data do not need to be converted to ESRI shapefiles when using OGR support with MapServer.

I chose to install the TIFF package separately so that it would be available to other programs (packages installed: libtiff and libtiff-devel). GDAL has internal TIFF support though I don't know what it consists of.

After installing libtiff, I built the entire GDAL package with './configure; make; su; make install'

Building MapServer

MapServer wanted me to install Freetype but there is no TSL Freetype so I installed version 2.1.9 from source with the traditional './configure; make; make install',

The configuration I used for the actual MapServer build looks like this:

./configure \
  --prefix=/usr/local/mapserver \
  --with-httpd=/usr/sbin/httpd  \
  --with-gd=/usr/local  \
  --with-freetype       \
  --with-jpeg           \
  --with-proj           \
  --with-ogr=/usr/local/bin/gdal-config \
  --with-gdal=/usr/local/bin/gdal-config --with-wfs \
  --with-tiff \
  --with-php=../php-4.4.0