BBOX Spatial Services

The BBOX Asset server is a service designed to serve static and templated files. It is primarily used to provide assets like fonts and other resources required by Tile services, and it can also function as a QGIS plugin repository.

Key capabilities include:

• Configurable base directories and endpoints.
• Serving fonts and other assets for Tile services.
• Hosting a QGIS plugin repository.

The BBOX tile server provides map tile serving and tile cache seeding. It supports both vector and raster tiles, as well as tile proxying and XYZ endpoints.

Tile Serving Features:

• OGC API – Tiles - Part 1: Core 1.0 compliance.
• Vector Tile Server: Supports PostGIS data sources and tile archives like MBTiles and PMTiles.
• Raster Tile Server: Uses QGIS Server and MapServer as backends.
• Tile Proxy Server: Uses a WMS backend.
• XYZ Tile Service: Provides endpoints with TileJSON metadata.
• Custom Tile Matrix Sets: Supported for specialized tiling schemes.

Tile Seeding Features:

• Parallelized Seeding: Efficiently seeds both raster and vector tiles.
• Storage Backends: Supports Files, S3, MBTiles, and PMTiles.

BBOX Server is a suite of composable spatial services. Depending on your needs, you can deploy specific components or the full suite. The core components include:

• BBOX Feature server: An OGC API Features service.
• BBOX Map server: An OGC API Map service.
• BBOX Tile server: An OGC API Tile service.
• BBOX Asset server: Used for serving static and templated files.
• BBOX Processes server: An OGC API Processes service.
• BBOX Routing server: An OGC API Routing service (currently experimental).

The BBOX map server provides the following capabilities:

• OGC WMS 1.3 Server: Full support for WMS 1.3 requests.
• FCGI Backends: Optimized dispatcher for WMS requests targeting:
  • QGIS Server
  • UNN Mapserver
• Instrumentation: Provides instrumentation data for WMS backends.

The BBOX OGC API Features Service is an asynchronous implementation of the OGC API - Features standard.

Supported Features:

• OGC API - Features - Part 1: Core 1.0
• OpenAPI endpoint
• Built-in storage backends: PostGIS, GeoPackage
• Output formats: GeoJSON

Note: Part 2 (Coordinate Reference Systems by Reference 1.0) is currently not implemented.

BBOX Server provides several production-ready features for spatial data services:

• High Performance: Built-in high performance HTTP server.
• API Documentation: OpenAPI support with a built-in UI.
• Observability: Instrumentation via Prometheus metrics and Jaeger tracing.
• Cloud Native: Health endpoints designed for Docker and Kubernetes hosting.
• Unified Configuration: Uses a common configuration file across components.
• Open Source: Licensed under Apache-2.0 / MIT.

While most functionality is included in the main bbox-server, the following components can also be run as standalone services:

• bbox-feature-server: Feature server
• bbox-map-server: Map server
• bbox-tile-server: Tile Server
• bbox-asset-server: Asset server
• bbox-processes-server: Processes server
• bbox-routing-server: Routing server

The BBOX OGC API Features Service is an asynchronous implementation of the OGC API - Features - Part 1: Core 1.0 standard. It supports PostGIS and GeoPackage as built-in storage backends, provides GeoJSON output formats, and is compatible with WFS and WFS-T via QGIS Server. You can run the server using the bbox-feature-server CLI tool.

To run the server using the default bbox.toml configuration, use the serve command. To use a specific configuration file (e.g., for PostGIS), use the --config flag.

# Run with default bbox.toml
bbox-feature-server serve

# Run with a custom configuration
bbox-feature-server --config=bbox-pg.toml serve