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
Install the packages in the prerequisites section first, and then build things in the order presented here, as there are interdependencies.
php proj gdal (and ogr) and finally MapServer
Prerequisites
Once you have the pieces installed, actually building MapServer is easy.
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.
Software development packages you will need include
flex gcc gcc-c++-devel glibc-devel make
Relevant packages that need to be installed with TSL 2.2 include, from a to z,
apache apache-devel freetype freetype-devel gd gd-devel libjpeg libjpeg-devel libpng libpng-devel libtiff libtiff-devel mysql-client mysql-devel xorg-x11-libs xorg-x11-devel zlib zlib-devel
There are probably a few that I missed. If you use the swup tool with TSL, it will resolve and automatically install other packages that depend on these.
To build PHP and MapServer, you need the '*-devel' packages. Running only requires the base packages.
The MySQL packages are only needed if you want to use MySQL. The xorg packages have many other things in them, but they are needed to build the XPM bitmap support which is mostly unneeded, I suppose.
PHP
I get the source for PHP 4.4.x from http://www.php.net/ Yes, I know version 5 is available, but MapServer does not support it yet.
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
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://neptune.cds1.net/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.
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 built the entire GDAL package with './configure; make; su; make install'
It takes a long time to build GDAL and OGR unless you have a modern, fast computer. It's a big collection of tools.
Building MapServer
As of this writing, I am building with source version 4.6.1. The configuration I used for the actual MapServer build looks like this:
./configure \ --with-httpd=/usr/sbin/httpd \ --with-gd \ --with-freetype \ --with-jpeg \ --with-png \ --with-tiff \ --with-proj \ --with-ogr=/usr/local/bin/gdal-config \ --with-gdal=/usr/local/bin/gdal-config \ --with-wfs \ --with-php=../php-4.4.0
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.
There is no 'make install' option for MapServer. You have to manually copy the files to the correct places. For my system the commands are
cp mapserv /home/httpd/cgi-bin/ mkdir /usr/local/lib/php/extensions cp mapscript/php3/php_mapscript.so /usr/local/lib/php/extensions
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 /usr/local/lib) 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.
There are several map services such as WMS and WCS that I choose not to build yet as I am not using them.
If you have the right proprietary libraries you can build versions of MapServer that support MrSID and ArcSDE.
