Installation

There are several options for installing MapIt. The rest of this page describes how to do this manually, for people who are used to setting up web applications, but there is also an install script for Debian or Ubuntu servers that may be easier.

If you prefer to set up each required component of MapIt yourself, proceed with the instructions below.

General notes

MapIt currently uses Postgres/PostGIS as its database backend – there’s no reason why e.g. SpatiaLite could not be used successfully, but it has never been tried.

1. Installing GeoDjango/PostGIS

To install GeoDjango and PostGIS, please follow all the standard instructions (including creating the template) over on the Django site at docs.djangoproject.com. And anything else you need to set up Django as normal.

[ Note for UK/Ireland: Not only is the PostGIS that is installed missing SRID 900913, as the GeoDjango docs tell you, but both SRID 27700 (British National Grid) and SRID 29902 (Irish National Grid) can be incorrect (and they’re quite important for this application!). After you’ve installed and got a PostGIS template, log in to it and update the proj4text column of SRID 27700 to include +datum=OSGB36, and update SRID 29902 to have +datum=ire65. This may not be necessary, depending on your version of PostGIS, but do check. ]

2. Installing other required packages

You will also need a couple of other packages, so install them:

sudo apt-get install python-gdal

Installation as a Django app

As MapIt is a Django app, if you are making a GeoDjango project you can use MapIt from within your project like any normal Django app:

Install MapIt as a python package:

  pip install django-mapit (or use -e git+https://github.com/mysociety/mapit to install from source control)

Open your settings.py and edit as follows:
- Add mapit and django.contrib.gis to your INSTALLED_APPS
- Add MAPIT_AREA_SRID – the SRID of your area data (if in doubt, set to 4326)
- Add MAPIT_COUNTRY – used to supply country specific functions (such as postcode validation). If you look at the country files in mapit/countries/ you can see how to add specialised country-specific functions.
- Add MAPIT_RATE_LIMIT – a list of IP addresses or User Agents excluded from default rate limiting
Set up the new database tables:
- ./manage.py migrate
Add a line to your urls.py patterns pointing at mapit.urls, for example:
```
      (r'^mapit/', include('mapit.urls')),
```

Installation standalone with the example project

A standard git clone will get you the repository:

  git clone --recurse-submodules git://github.com/mysociety/mapit.git
  cd mapit

Set up your configuration variables:

  cp conf/general.yml-example conf/general.yml

Now edit conf/general.yml to point to your local postgresql database, and edit the other settings as per the documentation given in that file. If you don’t know what AREA_SRID to use, delete that line or set it to 4326. COUNTRY is optional and can be used for e.g. differing sorts of postcode (zipcode) validation – if you look at the country files in mapit/countries/ you can see how to add specialised country-specific functions to validate postcodes etc.

If you’re going to be importing big datasets, make sure that DEBUG is False; otherwise, you’ll run out of memory as it tries to remember all the SQL queries made during an import.

Optionally, also turn off escape_string_warning in Postgres’ config (unless you want your server to run out of disc space logging all the errors, as ours did the first time I imported overnight and didn’t realise).
At this stage, you should be able to set up the database and run the development server. Firstly, set up a virtual environment and install the required packages:
```
  virtualenv .venv
  source .venv/bin/activate
  pip install -e .
```

Generate the CSS from the provided SASS:

  bin/mapit_make_css
  ./manage.py collectstatic

Create the database tables:
```
  ./manage.py migrate mapit
```
This can be a good time to add an admin user (though you can do this later):
```
  ./manage.py createsuperuser
```
Run the development server
```
  ./manage.py runserver
```

(Alternatively, set up a live web server however you wish - see the Deployment Django documentation for details beyond the scope of this document.)

You can then visit http://localhost:8000/ and hopefully see the default MapIt homepage. http://localhost:8000/admin/ should show the admin interface.

This is enough to have a working site. You can create areas and postcodes using the admin interface and they will automatically work in the API-based front end.

However, if you have some bulk data you wish to import (which will make setup easier), you will need to import this data into MapIt. Now see the section on importing data.