Tirex

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Available tiles on a tile server

Tirex (pronounced T-Rex) is a suite of programs for running a tile server, it was developed for OpenStreetMap tile servers but can be used for other maps, too.

Tirex is mostly written in Perl, it is Open Source and available from the GitHub.

Tirex performs roughly the same tasks as the well-known renderd, but is much more flexible.

The initial implementation of Tirex was paid by ENAiKOON (http://www.enaikoon.com/) and executed by Geofabrik (http://www.geofabrik.de).

Features

  • Splits queue management and tile rendering into different modules
  • Supports several tile rendering backends
  • Flexible priority queue that can handle thousands of jobs
  • Configurable parallel rendering that make sure your machine doesn't overload and high priority jobs are rendered quickly
  • Nifty status console that lets you see statistics and what your queues and renderers are doing
  • Powerful batch rendering command (tirex-batch) thats allows you to request rendering of tiles on defined zoom levels and bboxes and much more
  • Rendering backend manager that re-starts failed rendering backends
  • Tile rendering and caching in metatiles compatible to mod_tile/renderd system
  • No multi-threading which is notoriously difficult to debug
  • Uses multi-processing to use all the CPUs in your machine
  • Extensive documentation on the OSM wiki and many man pages
  • Most of the system implemented in Perl for flexibility
  • Lots of config options and many little utility scripts to encourage experimentation
  • Lots of unit tests for the Perl library to give you some confidence that it actually works
  • Easy to install because there are several Debian/Ubuntu packages for all parts of the system

Documentation

There are also man pages for all commands.

Tirex front-end servers

  • TileMan : Tile Server and utility that drive Tirex from Nginx high performance, non-blocking IO http derver directory.It support static tile distribution, client IP address detection and clustering features.
  • Tileserver : A nodeJS tileserver for Tirex that is sample implementation of driver.

Reference:

mod_tile and backwards compatibility

Tirex offers no replacement for mod_tile yet but it is planned to have one in the future. At the moment you can simply use the existing mod_tile, unchanged, with Tirex. Tirex uses the same meta tiles and the same directory structure, making it easy to switch from renderd to Tirex. More...

Who is using Tirex?