Web Mapping

Marco Hugentobler at the Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich has announced the QGIS MapServer project. From the website: “QGIS mapserver is a server module for geographic maps. The content of vector and raster datasources (e.g. shapefiles, gml, postgis, wfs, geotiff ) is visualized according to the request parameters. The generated map image is sent back to the client over the internet.” This project is very much in the early stages, as it requires a specific development version of QGIS.

In an effort to obtain a faster and lightweight solution, I decided to use Lighttpd (AKA Lighty) with FastCGI to power MapServer. Snooping around the MapServer site yielded no clues on how to configure Lighty. It turns out to be fairly simple. Here is the Lighttpd configuration: fastcgi.server = ( "/maps" = ( "localhost" = ( "socket" = "/tmp/mapserver-fastcgi.socket", "check-local" = "disable", "bin-path" = "/usr/lib/cgi-bin/mapserv", "min-procs" = 1, "max-procs" = 6, "