What is alaCarte?

alaCarte is a tile renderer for OpenStreetMap data written in C++11, using Cairo for rendering and Boost-Spirit for MapCSS parsing.

The rendered tiles are served over HTTP using the Slippy map tilenames convention.

To compute which data is needed for rendering a tile, alaCarte uses a variant of a kd-Tree.

alaCarte was designed with medium dataset size in mind. On a typical machine with at leat 8GB RAM, alaCarte can handle a unfiltered export from the federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg (Germany).

alaCarte was developed as part of a lab course student software project at KIT. For the old project files (mostly in German) see the old project repository.

alaCarte has also has a growing website at http://alacarte-maps.github.io.

Features

easy to use
most MapCSS attributes are implemented
no need to filter OSM exports, you have full access to all attributes at runtime
stylesheets are updated at runtime (changes are detected automatically)
tiles can be rendered in groups ("meta tile") to speed up rendering (not in 0.2)

How to build

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make

Dependencies

Cairo (>=1.12.0), Cairomm
Boost (Spirit)
SigC++
libpng
log4cpp

Usage

(from build directory)

./alacarte-importer osm_export.osm data.carte
./alacarte-server -g data.carte -s ../data/mapcss

You can use the test Leaftlet-Page located in tests/html/Leaflet/index.html to view the rendered tiles.

You can download fresh OSM exports from Geofabrik.

Install

(as root)

make install

The config-file is located in /etc/alacarte.conf. You should make sure the user running alacarte has permissions to write to the specified directories for caching and logging.

To Do

Real database backend
Better font rendering (Pango?)
Unicode support
Implement MapCSS-include
Better caching of fonts and icons
Option to "tune" imported data for specific stylesheets