Tile Drawer makes designing and hosting custom maps simple and straightforward. The project lets anyone run their own OpenStreetMap server in the cloud with one-step configuration and zero administration. Tile Drawer is a product of Stamen Design’s Michal Migurski.

You can use the rendered map tiles in a number of ways: with other GIS data in OpenLayers, in a Flash application built on Modest Maps, or layered into a Google Map as a custom map tile overlay.

This site is really new, read more at the announcement blog post.

Why & How

OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style map of the world that anyone can edit. You can get the raw data for roads around the world, set up a server, design a new map style, and have your own personal online interactive maps. In the past, this has been difficult owing to the large volume of data required and the hassles of system administration. Tile Drawer is designed to make this process easy with a custom-configured Amazon EC2 machine image (AMI) that gets you up and running with just two pieces of information: a custom stylesheet that you choose, and the geographical location of a part of the world you'd like rendered.

Get Started

Follow the steps below to select a coverage location, choose a map rendering style, enter a data source, and starting your Tile Drawer instance.

1. Select A Location

Pan and zoom the map to the area you’d like to render.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA

A small Amazon EC2 instance (1 CPU, 512MB RAM) is sufficient to comfortably render a small state, region, or major metropolitan area. This is a rule of thumb, you may want to experiment a bit if you’re unsure. Start small!

2. Choose Your Style

Enter the complete URL of a Cascadenik stylesheet.

Check the Map Styles page for a few pre-made styles that you can use now, or as a basis for writing your own. The default one above is “Scratch”.

3. Pick A Data Source

Enter the complete URL of an OpenStreetMap dump file, generally a bzipped *.osm file.

The default Planet file from planet.openstreetmap.org is a weekly dump of the complete OpenStreetMap data set, and is very large and will take many hours to get started. For faster startup time, you can specify an alternate data source such as an *.osm.bz2 extract from Cloudmade’s per-country downloads.

4. Start Your Instance

Launch an instance of Amazon EC2 AMI ami-e1ea0a88.

This is the user data you’ll provide to your Amazon EC2 instance when you’re ready to launch it:

The data above must be copied exactly to work, including the curly braces (it’s run through a JSON parser). If you’re using the AWS Management Console, you can do this under the Advanced Options in the instance launch wizard:

(Don’t check “base64 encoded”)

5. Sit Tight

Depending on your data source and location, it can take anywhere from 15 minutes to many hours for your new instance to unpack itself. You can check up on the process by visiting http://{address}/status.php, and when it is complete individual tiles will be available at http://{address}/tilecache/1.0.0/osm/{Z}/{X}/{Y}.png, along with an interactive slippy map at http://{address}/preview.php.

That’s it, you’re done. If you’re happy with how the map looks, then you don’t need to do anything more. As you view more of the map, the tiles will render slowly at first, and then more quickly as they are cached.

Contact: info@tiledrawer.com

Logo & illustration by Nicolas Marichal, USE-IT.

Background by David McLouth, PlaGMaDA.
Used without permission.