Creating WMS and WFS services with MapServer

In this recipe, you will see how to create a WMS and WFS from a PostGIS layer, using the popular MapServer open source web-mapping engine.

You will then use the services, testing their exposed requests, using first a browser and then a desktop tool such as QGIS (you could do this using other software, such as uDig, gvSIG, and OpenJUMP GIS).

Getting ready

Follow these steps before getting ready:

1. Create a schema for this chapter within the postgis_cookbook database using the following command:

postgis_cookbook=# create schema chp09;

2. Be sure to have Apache HTTP installed (MapServer will run on it as a CGI) and check whether it is working by visiting its home page at http://localhost (typically, an It works! message will be displayed if you still have not customized any features).
3. Install MapServer as per its installation guide (http://mapserver.org/installation/index.html).

Note

A handy way to have MapServer up and running in Apache for Windows is to install...