Getting Started

Tileviewer can be run according to your needs. Here are the two most common ways to run it.

Bundled into TileMaker

Most users should choose to use the TileMaker software to streamline their workflow. TileMaker allows users to create and serve data from a SQL database that is compatible with TileViewer. The service is built and served by FastAPI, which conveniently can bundle and serve the TileViewer user interface as well. Follow its documentation to get up and running with this approach.

Run Both Tilemaker and Tileviewer Locally

This approach makes the most sense when developing or contributing to the TileViewer software. In this approach, we will clone TileViewer and use Vite to run it locally while pointing it to a locally-run tile service as well.

1. Clone and initialize TileViewer

git clone git@github.com:simonsobs/tileviewer.git
cd tileviewer
npm install

2. Create a .env.development file by copying the contents from .env.development.sample. You may need to amend the VITE_SERVICE_URL depending on what port your tile server actually runs on.

3. Depending on your tile server setup:

   3A. If using TileMaker:

   • Clone the repo and follow its README instructions for generating data and running the server.

   • Amend the settings.py file as follows:

     # vite's dev server is configured to be on port 8080; amend as desired.
     origins: list[str] | None = ["http://localhost:8080"]
     add_cors: bool = True
   

   • Run the tile server locally via tilemaker serve --port=9191 (if you set a different port in the .env.development file, then match it accordingly)

   3B. If using your own tile server:

   • Set the VITE_SERVICE_URL environment variable in .env.development to point to your local server

   • Run your tile server locally

4. Run the client dev server via npm run dev and open a browser with the localhost URL shown in the console.