Rails Offline Maps Solution

0
votes

A Rails application that I have created features a MapBox implementation where location markers update based on changes in a Rails model and are displayed on a map... easy, peasy. The demo application is hosted on Heroku so there is always a connection to the greater internet, thus there is always a connection to the MapBox servers.

Now that we have a customer that would like to implement our app, it will be deployed on a local area network without a connection to the internet. This breaks our MapBox implementation as we can no longer reach out to the MapBox servers.

The map functionality is a great feature of our app and I would like to science a solution for offline maps on a local area network. I haven't had any luck or had a brilliant idea to fix my mapping problems through my extended Googling.

How can I have Google Maps or MapBox like functionality in an offline Rails application?

1
ruby-on-railsgoogle-mapsmapsmapboxoffline
The only way to do so is to create your own map, grid and complete functionality of google maps. in my opinion thats re inventing the wheel also rails gems like geocoder will need access to google maps - Artem Ankudovich

1 Answers

1
votes

Sounds like you need to deploy a tile server on that intranet. Then you can point your web app to use that local tile server as opposed to one on the internet. Here are some recommendations.

https://github.com/cutting-room-floor/tilestream "MapBox Hosting uses the same internals as TileStream but adds many features and is a hosted service rather than an installable application."

http://tilestache.org/