The home page of TileCache is tilecache.org, where the source can be retrieved for installation. At the time of this writing, the current release is version 1.9 and options may vary with different releases.
To get started, we are going to assume a vanilla Red Hat-type operating system, such as Fedora 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or CentOS 5. It is assumed that the Apache web server and the Python language environment are installed and that defaults are largely unchanged. Although we will install into your home directory, it is necessary to make minor modifications to system configuration files, so it will be necessary on a few occasions to have root access, either through su or sudo.
To get started, we will install into the public_html/
directory in our home directory. If this directory exists and Apache is configured correctly, it's contents are accessible through a web browser. Red Hat, however, ships with this facility disabled, so we must first enable it. As root, edit the file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and change the line
UserDir disable
to
UserDir public_html
Also, we need to enable CGI execution within the public_html and associate the .cgi extension with CGI handler. In /etc/httpd/conf.d/, create a file named tilecache.conf with the following contents:
<Directory /home/username/public_html/tilecache/bin/>
Options +Indexes
</Directory>
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
Then, reload Apache (as root):
# /sbin/service httpd configtest && /sbin/service httpd graceful
Next create the directory, make a test file and try to retrieve it:
$mkdir ~/public_html$echo 'Hello world!' > ~/public_html/test.txt$curl http://localhost/~username/test.txtHello world!
If that works as expected, then we have the minimal Apache setup required for TileCache to work.
Retrieve the tar.gz file from the TileCache web site and extract it from the tar archive:
$ curl http://www.tilecache.org/tilecache-1.9.tar.gz | tar zxf -
TileCache builds and installs using the standard Python distutils facility. For our purposes, the following command will suffice:
$cd tilecache-1.9$python setup.py install --home ~/public_htmlrunning install running build running build_py running build_scripts running install_lib running install_scripts changing mode of /home/username/public_html/tilecache/bin/tilecache_http_server.py to 775 changing mode of /home/username/public_html/tilecache/bin/tilecache.fcgi to 775 changing mode of /home/username/public_html/tilecache/bin/tilecache.cgi to 775 changing mode of /home/username/public_html/tilecache/bin/tilecache_clean.py to 775 changing mode of /home/username/public_html/tilecache/bin/tilecache_seed.py to 775 running install_data copying tilecache.cfg -> /etc error: /etc/tilecache.cfg: Permission denied
In the last couple of lines, TileCache has foolishly attempted to disregard my --home option and tried to install its configuration file in /etc. We will therefore need to modify TileCache to look for tilecache.cfg in a different place. Also, to avoid ambiguities of Python module paths, we will expressly configure the path in the TileCache scripts.
We also must copy the tilecache.cfg to ~/public_html/tilecache/
First, edit ~/public_html/tilecache/lib/python/TileCache/Service.py. Change line 12 from
cfgfiles = (os.path.join(workingdir, "tilecache.cfg"), os.path.join(workingdir,"..","tilecache.cfg"))
to
cfgfiles = ("/home/username/public_html/tilecache/tilecache.cfg","tilecache.cfg")
Next, edit ~/public_html/tilecache/bin/tilecache.cgi by inserting the following lines at line 2:
import sys
sys.path.append('/home/username/public_html/tilecache/lib/python/')
Add the same two lines to tilecache_seed.py at line 7.
If all has gone well, we should now be able to display TileCache's test layer. Copy either of the following URLs into your browser's location bar and modify the username as necessary.
http://localhost/~username/tilecache/bin/tilecache.cgi?LAYERS=basic&SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.1.1&REQUEST=GetMap&SRS=EPSG:4326&BBOX=-180,-90,0,90&WIDTH=256&HEIGHT=25 http://localhost/~username/tilecache/bin/tilecache.cgi/1.0.0/basic/0/0/0.png
