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The Newsapps Boundary Service is a ready-to-deploy system for aggregating regional boundary data (from shapefiles) and republishing via a RESTful JSON API. It is packaged as a pluggable Django application so that it can be easily integrated into any project.

This project allows you to easily create sites like You are here. and Smith County Boundaries.

Getting Started

First, install the requirements. This assumes you already have Python 2.7.

sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install virtualenv
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Next, create a PostgreSQL database, as the Boundary Service depends on PostGIS.

DB=EXAMPLE_DB_NAME
createdb -h localhost $DB
createlang -h localhost plpgsql $DB

To spatially-enable the database, you must load PostGIS definitions files. You can use locate (Linux) or mdfind (OS X) to find these files.

psql -h localhost -d $DB -f postgis.sql
psql -h localhost -d $DB -f spatial_ref_sys.sql

It may be worthwhile to create a template database if you will be creating many PostGIS databases.

Lastly, configure the DATABASES Django setting and and create the database tables.

cp settings_override.py.example settings_override.py
vi settings_override.py
python manage.py syncdb

You can now copy definitions.py.example to start adding your geospatial data:

cp data/shapefiles/definitions.py.example data/shapefiles/definitions.py

Adding geospatial data

Add your geospatial data to data/shapefiles. It may be a zipfile or a directory containing a shp, shx, dbf, prj. Then, fill in definitions.py. Note that the keys of the SHAPEFILES dictionary and the value of the singular key should be ASCII.

Then, run python manage.py loadshapefiles. Note that this command will import everything under data/shapefiles. If you're already run this command once, then you'll want to specify which data to import. You can include (whitelist) data for import:

python manage.py loadshapefiles -o KeyA,KeyB,...

Or exclude (blacklist) data for import:

python manage.py loadshapefiles -e KeyA,KeyB,...

Important Note: The comma-separated arguments are the keys of the SHAPEFILES dictionary with spaces removed.

If you want to reset the database and start over, run:

python manage.py loadshapefiles -c

If that doesn't work you can always do:

python manage.py sqlreset boundaryservice | psql -h localhost DB_NAME

Development

To test it locally:

python manage.py runserver
curl http://127.0.0.1:8000/1.0/

Customization

To localize the sample boundary sets, etc. edit these two files:

  • Edit EXAMPLE_* in settings_override.py

Deployment

In settings_override.py:

  • configure CACHES
  • set COMPRESS_ENABLED = True
  • set API_DOMAIN

Troubleshooting

If python manage.py runserver quits unexpectedly without error, use an alternative server:

pip install gunicorn
python manage.py collectstatic
gunicorn_django settings.py

If python manage.py loadshapefiles causes this error:

ERROR 1: dlopen(/Library/Application Support/GDAL/1.8/PlugIns/ogr_GRASS.dylib, 1): Symbol not found: __ZN11OGRSFDriver14CopyDataSourceEP13OGRDataSourcePKcPPc
  Referenced from: /Library/Application Support/GDAL/1.8/PlugIns/ogr_GRASS.dylib
  Expected in: flat namespace
 in /Library/Application Support/GDAL/1.8/PlugIns/ogr_GRASS.dylib

you may resolve it on OS X by running:

brew install gdal-grass

If python manage.py loadshapefiles causes this error:

IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/folders/yn/4cwyp7v55w1c127fbn8sk8gm0000gn/...'

make sure that all files referenced in definitions.py exist.

Contributing

Attribution

This Boundary Service instance uses the following open-source software: