Mapserver on Linux
How I built MapServer for "Mapping Vietnam"
The Vietnam mapserver is now running at Tektonic.net. I like them for a full access virtual machine. Please get an account there and use me as a referral, I get a discount. :-)
It is possible to run Mapserver on cheap sites, like Hostmonster.com. Hostmonster does 80% of what Tektonic does but for 1/3 as much. Do use Hostmonster for testing and demo, but get a better hosting service if you go live with a site. If your site gets any significant traffic, hostmonster will shut you down! They strictly limit you to 5% CPU share and that's tiny. So be careful what you wish for. A successful site will be shut down.
Starting point
The Mapserver site is full of useful information. A good way to start is to go to the Documentation page and look for the pages linked there on compilation.
I used the cpanel tools at Hostmonster to create a server called mapserver, which means a directory will be created for you accessible as http://mapserver.YOURDOMAIN/. You should go figure out how to do that right now and then come back here. When you are done, you will have a directory structure like this
Top level: ~/public_html/mapserver/ and inside it: cgi-bin/ where executables go html/ where the web pages go
If you call your server something else (or you just want to install in your default hostmonster server) you will need to adjust the commands below to replace "mapserver" with the name of your web server directory.
Building MapServer for Hostmonster
I can't install packages (as in Debian/Ubuntu DPKG or Fedora/Redhat RPM) because at Hostmonster I don't get root access to the machine.
Therefore, I have to compile what I need from source. At this point, this is a very basic configuration but it's fine for learning more about MapServer.
For the Vietnam project, in addition to MapServer I need to install and build the supporting projects proj4 and gdal. All the other libraries I want are already installed on Hostmonster's server.
Download each package, build and install it, in order
This section was last updated 5/20/2011. If some time has passed, you can check the Web sites for each project to find the latest versions.
First I log in to my Hostmonster account via SSH. (Windows user? Try putty.) When I get to a shell prompt I create a source directory to store enverything.
[~] # mkdir src
{~] # cd src
[~/src] #
(Leaving off the command prompt from now on)
Libproj
wget http://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-4.7.0.tar.gz tar xzf proj-4.7.0.tar.gz cd proj-4.7.0 ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local make install cd ..
GDAL -- See also Building GDAL on Linux
wget http://download.osgeo.org/gdal/gdal-1.8.0.tar.gz tar xzf gdal-1.8.0.tar.gz cd gdal-1.8.0 ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local make install cd ..
Mapserver -- Download and unpack
wget http://download.osgeo.org/mapserver/mapserver-6.0.0.tar.gz tar xzvf mapserver-6.0.0.tar.gz cd mapserver-6.0.0
Configuration -- It's more complex for Mapserver because there are so many options. The following configure command works on Hostmonster, because they have a lot of libraries installed.
There are other options you might want to turn on. To see the complete list of available options, use the command "./configure --help"
If you get errors at the configure command, you could remove the offending library reference and try again.
./configure --enable-static=yes \ --with-gdal=$HOME/local/bin/gdal-config \ --with-ogr=$HOME/local/bin/gdal-config \ --with-proj=$HOME/local \ --with-gd=/usr --enable-gd-imgstrttf \ --with-freetype-dir=/usr \ --with-jpeg-dir=/usr \ --with-png-dir=/usr \ --enable-gd-native-ttf \ --with-zlib \ --with-gettext \ --with-xml2-config=/usr/bin/xml2-config \ --with-mysql=/usr/bin/mysql_config
When configure completes you will get a report similar to this:
MapServer is now configured for -------------- Compiler Info ------------- C compiler: gcc -O2 -fPIC -Wall -DNDEBUG C++ compiler: g++ -O2 -fPIC -Wall -DNDEBUG Debug: Generic NINT: -------------- Renderer Settings --------- OpenGL support: zlib support: -DUSE_ZLIB png support: -DUSE_PNG gif support: -DUSE_GIF jpeg support: -DUSE_JPEG freetype support: -DUSE_FREETYPE iconv support: -DUSE_ICONV AGG support: internal SVG Symbol support: -DUSE_AGG_SVG_SYMBOLS Cairo (SVG,PDF) support: KML support: -------------- Support Libraries --------- Proj.4 support: -DUSE_PROJ Libxml2 support: -DUSE_LIBXML2 FriBidi support: Curl support: FastCGI support: Threading support: GEOS support: XML Mapfile support: XSLT support: EXSLT support: -------------- Data Format Drivers ------- PostGIS support: ArcSDE support: OGR support: -DUSE_OGR GDAL support: -DUSE_GDAL Oracle Spatial support: -------------- OGC Services -------------- WMS Server: -DUSE_WMS_SVR WMS Client: WFS Server: WFS Client: WCS Server: SOS Server: -------------- MapScript ----------------- PHP MapScript: no
Then you are ready to press on. Unlike other programs where you type "make" and then "make install", installation consists of copying the mapserv executable to a place where your Web server can access it. On Hostmonster, (assuming your server is called "mapserver") here are the commands
make cp mapserv $HOME/public_html/mapserver/cgi-bin/
Set up a test map
Create a temp directory
Create a data directory and put some data in it
Set up a map
Call it
I put some test data on my server in mapserver/html/demo. So this should work. But it doesn't! I am working on it RIGHT NOW.
http://mapserver.wildsong.biz/cgi-bin/mapserv?map=../demo.map&mode=map
Building MapServer for Tektonic.net (or any Debian/Ubuntu host)
I will be updating this section soon... ask me if you want help immediately. Brian Wilson 11:18, 20 May 2011 (MDT)
This is a more complete build, with support for PostGIS and MapScript and so on.
Originally I built PHP/Mapscript to run under Apache 2.0.54 on a system based on Trustix Linux 2.2. I have since revised this document as I have switched to using Debian and Ubuntu.
Package prerequisites
For performance reasons I want to use PHP as a loadable module so I am building PHP/Mapscript (as opposed to using it as a CGI).
To build MapServer, you need various '*-dev' packages. Running mapserver only requires installing the base packages.
Packages needed on Ubuntu include the following. There are probably others. These are the packages I had to add to an already running server system.
build-essential (which installs many compiler tools and libraries) flex make (which should already be installed) apache2-prefork-dev php4-dev libxpm-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libfreetype6-dev libgd2-xpm-dev libcurl3-dev is needed for wfs support proj gdal-bin libgdal1-dev
PHP
Mapserver and nearly all the software I run now support php version 5, so I am using the version that comes with Ubuntu.
PHP 4
For now I am leaving these notes here which cover building php4 for Mapserver.
I get the source for PHP 4.4.2 from http://www.php.net/
The options I used for the PHP 4.4 configure script on Ubuntu are:
./configure \
--with-apxs2=`which apxs2` \
--with-pear \
--with-gd=/usr --enable-gd-imgstrttf \
--with-freetype-dir=/usr \
--with-jpeg-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 \
--with-pgsql
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
If you create a file containing <?php phpinfo(); ?>
and put it in your Web server somewhere, you can test your PHP installation and see what is enabled and see many many other details. Here is my example: http://mapserver.wildsong.biz/phpinfo.php
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.
Proj4 is provided by the Ubuntu 'proj' package.
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.
The Ubuntu package gdal-bin and the development package libgdal1-dev are what we need.
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.
Building MapServer
As of this writing, I am building with source version 4.8.3. The configuration I used for the actual MapServer build looks like this:
./configure \ --with-httpd=/usr/sbin/apache2 \ --with-gd \ --with-freetype \ --with-jpeg \ --with-png \ --with-tiff \ --with-proj \ --with-ogr=/usr/bin/gdal-config \ --with-gdal=/usr/bin/gdal-config \ --with-wfs \ --with-php=/usr/include/php4 \ --with-wmsclient for chameleon
This builds both the CGI executable 'mapserv' and the PHP/Mapscript module. There are options to build for other languages including java, perl, python, ruby, and tcl. I might try the python variant soon since I am already using it on the Windows side. If so, I will update this document.
Installation of binaries
There is no 'make install' option for MapServer. You have to manually copy the files to the correct places. For my Ubuntu system the commands are
cp mapserv /home/httpd/wildsong/cgi-bin/ cp mapscript/php3/php_mapscript.so /usr/lib/php4/20060606/
Locations for binaries are highly system dependent.
The first line will install the CGI executable, which is not really the exciting part. But you can test it immediately without any input; here is my copy: http://neptune.cds1.net/cgi-bin/mapserv If it works, you will get a page containing this line:
No query information to decode. QUERY_STRING is set, but empty
Activating PHP/Mapscript
If you just installed php you probably don't have any extensions, so you have add a directory in which to store them. Then you have to put the mapscript module there.
The module will not be loaded unless you add a line in php.ini (mine is in /et /etc/php4) thusly:
extension=php_mapscript.so
You have to restart Apache to get the module to load. You can't really type in a URL to test it but you can still see information about it with phpinfo as mentioned above. You should see a section in its output similar to this:
MapScript MapServer version 4.8.3 OUTPUT=GIF OUTPUT=PNG OUTPUT=JPEG OUTPUT=WBMP OUTPUT=SVG SUPPORTS=PROJ SUPPORTS=FREETYPE SUPPORTS=WMS_SERVER SUPPORTS=WMS_CLIENT SUPPORTS=WFS_SERVER INPUT=EPPL7 INPUT=OGR INPUT=GDAL INPUT=SHAPEFILE PHP MapScript Version ($Revision: 1.242.2.2 $ $Date: 2006/03/16 21:03:01 $)
If you have the right proprietary libraries you can build versions of MapServer that support MrSID and ArcSDE.
Running Mapserver on Linux
Well, I am going to jump back over to the main MapServer doc here; aside from the obvious differences with paths in the MAP file, it should not really matter whether you are running Apache/PHP on Linux or IIS/PHP on Windows.
