fzadow / tileserver

Tileserver

This is the TileBuilder tile server. It serves image tiles for CATMAID. TileBuilder is a self-contained Java application that launches a web server on a configurable port (default: 8080). TileBuilder reads images in a specialized HDF5 format which can be generated with the Fiji plugin from the /scripts directory.

TileBuilder has been tested to run with Java 7 and 8.

Simple Installation (using the pre-built TileBuilder.war)

• Create a directory that you want to run TileBuilder from on your web server and change to that directory. For example, go to your home (~) directory and create the directory "tilebuilder":

cd ~
mkdir tilebuilder
cd tilebuilder

• Within the directory you created, create another directory that will later hold the images TileBuilder will serve.

mkdir images

• Download the WAR file from the /target directory and the sample configuration file to your server, for example by using these commands

wget https://github.com/fzadow/tileserver/raw/master/target/tilebuilder.war
wget https://github.com/fzadow/tileserver/raw/master/config.properties

• customize the file config.properties you just downloaded:

  • source_image_dir
  • tile_dir
  • writable_tile_dir

• run TileBuilder java -jar tilebuilder.war

Command line options

These command line options can be used when running TileBuilder:

• --server.port=9000 runs Tilebuilder on port 9000 instead of the default (8080)
• -Dlevel=DEBUG to enable debug output

Usage

TileBuilder responds to tile requests via HTTP with the syntax for TileSource type 9, described in detail in the CATMAID documentation:

http://tileserver:8000/imagename/stackname/s/r_c_z.jpg

Here, imagename identifies the HDF5 file containing the image data (imagename.h5) and its associated description file (imagename.yaml), stackname identifies the name of the HDF5 Group within the HDF5 file, s is the slice index, r is the row (y-coordinate), c is the column (x-coordinate), z is the zoom level.

To display an image with TileBuilder in CATMAID, import it via the Importer admin tool in CATMAID.

Compilation

Maven 3 is used to manage dependencies and compile the project. To create a new WAR file, use the following command: mvn package. The generated tileserver.war file can be found in the target folder.