maptool/docs/development.adoc

Development guide

Table of Contents

• Web app only
• Offline map data
• GNSS position (gpsd)
• Continuous integration

Web app only

bundle install
bundle exec puma -C config/puma.rb

Open http://127.0.0.1:4567. For auto-reload during development, run via the rerun gem instead:

bundle exec rerun -- bundle exec puma -C config/puma.rb

Tip	Browsers apply heuristic caching to static files even without explicit cache headers, so an edit to public/ (or views/) can appear not to have taken effect on the next reload. Force a real reload (e.g. Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+R) if that happens.

Offline map data

To enable the offline style, place a PMTiles file at data/offline.pmtiles (see docs/architecture.adoc for how it is served and styled). It is not part of the repository — obtain or build one locally:

• The simplest source is a pre-built extract from protomaps.com’s extract builder — pick a region and download it as .pmtiles. Its schema is what protomaps-themes-base (the styling library used for the offline style) expects.

• To convert some other vector tile source (e.g. an .mbtiles file) into PMTiles, use the go-pmtiles CLI: pmtiles convert in.mbtiles data/offline.pmtiles.

Once the file is in place, GET /api/offline-tiles reports available: true and the map defaults to the offline style.

GNSS position (gpsd)

The "GNSS" control needs gpsd running and pointed at a receiver (gpsd /dev/ttyUSB0, or whatever device the receiver shows up as). On openSUSE, gpsd is a package with systemd units (gpsd.service / gpsd.socket); on other distributions, check your package manager. No app-side configuration is needed — it just connects to 127.0.0.1:2947, gpsd’s default port.

To test without hardware, feed gpsd a fake NMEA stream over TCP instead of a real serial device — gpsd accepts a tcp://host:port source:

# terminal 1: a TCP server repeating one NMEA GGA/RMC sentence pair
python3 - <<'PY' 5001
import socket, sys, time

def checksum(s):
    cs = 0
    for ch in s:
        cs ^= ord(ch)
    return f"{cs:02X}"

def sentence(body):
    return f"${body}*{checksum(body)}\r\n"

port = int(sys.argv[1])
srv = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
srv.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1)
srv.bind(("127.0.0.1", port))
srv.listen(1)
conn, _ = srv.accept()
gga = "GPGGA,123519,4808.916,N,01706.462,E,1,08,0.9,140.4,M,46.9,M,,"
rmc = "GPRMC,123519,A,4808.916,N,01706.462,E,000.5,084.4,230824,003.1,W"
while True:
    conn.sendall((sentence(gga) + sentence(rmc)).encode())
    time.sleep(1)
PY

# terminal 2: point gpsd at it instead of a real device
gpsd -N -n tcp://127.0.0.1:5001

GET /api/gnss/position should then report the fake fix (Bratislava Castle, in the sentences above) within a couple of seconds.

Continuous integration

.gitea/workflows/ci.yml runs on every push/PR against a self-hosted Gitea Actions runner: ruby -c on every .rb file, a require_relative "app" smoke check that the app loads without error, and node --check on every file under public/js/. There is no test suite yet — these are cheap syntax/load checks, not behavioral tests.

.gitea/workflows/renovate.yml runs Renovate (the renovate/renovate image) weekly (Mondays, also triggerable manually), opening PRs for outdated dependencies (Bundler Gemfile/Gemfile.lock, auto-detected — no renovate.json needed) against this Gitea instance (RENOVATE_PLATFORM=gitea). It runs on the native deploy runner (see docs/deployment.adoc) as a one-shot docker run, not a persistent service. Needs a RENOVATE_TOKEN repo secret — a Gitea personal access token (Settings → Applications → Generate New Token, with repository read/write scope) from whichever account should author the PRs; RENOVATE_ONBOARDING=false skips Renovate’s usual first-PR "configure me" step and goes straight to dependency update PRs using its defaults.