Host Your Own Offline Mapping Server

What this is - A step-by-step tutorial on how to host an offline basemap for other GeoSpatial applications to use.

Specific steps are documented in the following notebook

Publication of project on Towards Data Science (TDS)

Pre-requisites to run jupyter notebook locally

• Running: Python 3.7.9
• Using: pip 20.2.4
• OS: Windows 10

Functionality of each .bat file

Filename	Functionality
activate_env.bat	activate virtual environment .env and upgrade pip on Windows OS
pip_freeze.bat	output all python packages into requirements.txt file and overwrites it
pip_install_requirements.bat	pip install all python packages based on requirements.txt file
run_jupyter_notebook.bat	run jupyter notebook on port 8889
python/scripts/01_stream_tiles.bat	run python script stream_tileimages.py i.e. start streaming map tile images and save into local folders
transform_to_mbtiles.bat & python/scripts/02_transform_to_mbtiles.bat	use mbutil lib to package tile image into mbtiles file
python/scripts/03_run_flask_app.bat	run python script serve_web_app.py and navigate to http://localhost:9000 to view basemap

• The folder python_scripts runs independently of the jupyter notebook. The jupyter notebook is for first-time users and used for illustrations sake.
• Note: The jupyter notebook had been developed in a python virtual environment created via the command virtualenv .env

Update on 02-Nov-2020

A few things to note in this Git Repo:

• .mbutil has been included so users may skip the step of downloading the library from https://github.com/mapbox/mbutil
  • The .bat file named: transform_to_mbtiles.bat can be run to package a folder of tile images and output a mbtiles file. Do change the parameters inside the .bat file.
• The folder python_scripts contains numbered .bat files which can be run directly in the order. For users who wish to execute a script instead of the jupyter notebook.