Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 8, Building the Geospatial Web

#91 Build Interactive Web-Based Map Applications

HACK

This is not the “right” way to configure MapServer, but there is a good

chance that this will work (especially if you already have the GD image

libraries installed). The document “HOWTO for Getting Started with

MapServer” (http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/doc/getstarted-howto.html) con-

tains links to detailed instructions for building MapServer under other plat-

forms, and with more options.

Once you’ve compiled MapServer, you can test its capabilities:

$ ./mapserv -v

MapServer version 4.2.4 OUTPUT=PNG OUTPUT=JPEG OUTPUT=WBMP SUPPORTS=FREETYPE

INPUT=TIFF INPUT=EPPL7 INPUT=JPEG INPUT=SHAPEFILE

This means that MapServer can read ESRI Shapefiles and write JPEG and

PNG images. This is just a taste of what MapServer can do, but “tall trees

from little acorns grow.”

Copy the program mapserv to a directory that can execute CGI programs.

On a default Fedora or Debian system, that is likely to be /var/www/cgi-bin

(on a SuSE system, it is probably /srv/www/cgi-bin). Test that the web server

is correctly configured by going to http://localhost/cgi-bin/mapserv, or use the

server’s Internet domain name if you are testing a remote machine (e.g.,

http://yourserver.com/cgi-bin/mapserv). You should get the message:

No query information to decode. QUERY_STRING is set, but empty.

This means that the program is running but you ...