Sputnik
Style Prototyping Utility for Mapnik
Sputnik is a quick-and-dirty way of seeing your changes to a Mapnik stylesheet reflected in real time. It provides a simple tileserver, a full-window map view, and a 'refresh' button which reloads the map using your latest stylesheet.
How
Copy sputnik.html to a web-browsable directory.
Start the server on port 8000 with
ruby sputnik.rb path_to_your.mml
Open sputnik.html in your web browser.
Why
Tilemill and Kosmtik are beautifully crafted works of wonder and do pretty much everything the Mapnik-toting cartographer could want. Sputnik is not a work of wonder, it's a messy 100-line hack. It does, however, provide a rudimentary alternative if you want latest/hackable Carto features, use your own editor, and are fed up of struggling with NodeJS installation.
Installation requirements
- 'Simple Mapnik' bindings (replacing Ruby-Mapnik which was basically uninstallable)
- Carto (command-line compiler,
npm install -g carto) - Mapnik
- obvious stuff like Ruby, a webserver, etc. etc.
Installation
First, install ruby, autoconf, automake, rubygem-cairo-devel, boost-devel, mapnik-devel, npm. Then:
npm install -g carto
gem install rake-compiler rake
gem install hoe rice chunky_png cairo rubyzip bundler
gem install simple_mapnik
Notes
Your map location is bookmarkable, so you can return to the place you were testing yesterday.
There is a little bit of postprocessing to support famous gravitystorm list placement hack.
The XML stylesheet is written to the style directory (as .tmp.xml), ready for upload to your production server.
To do
There should be more postprocessing to support comments and macros in the .mml. Hell yes.
Images are generated as individual 256x256 tiles. This means no metatiling, so (a) slow, (b) label placement is not very representative of your final map.
Development
WTFPL. Pull requests are encouraged, ideally retaining the principle of "one .rb, one .html".