Running Maperitive on MacOS X

I was looking for a way to run maperitive, which is a software that allows you to convert OpenStreetMap (OSM) data files in .pbf and .bz2 (that you can find on Geomatrik) to a Mbtiles file format. Mbtiles is a format created by mapbox that allows to stores millions of tiles in a SQLite database, which can be useful if you want to build an OSM solution that will store tiles offline.

Maperitive is a .NET application, that should typically works with mono on Linux and on Mac and will work natively on Windows. However, the author does not provide official support for Mac (installations for Linux are here).

I first downloaded Maperitive (2.3.33 at the time of this writing)

I first tried to install mono with homebrew and then launch the executable maperitive.exe located inside the maperitive directory
mono maperitive.exe
However I got this error
Unhandled Exception:

System.TypeInitializationException: An exception was thrown by the type initializer for System.Drawing.KnownColors —> System.TypeInitializationException: An exception was thrown by the type initializer for System.Drawing.GDIPlus —> System.DllNotFoundException: libgdiplus.dylib

However, I got lucky and found a recent solution in this github ticket

First had to install brew cask

brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask

Installed mono-sdk with brew cask

 brew cask install mono-mdk 

And then opened the installer to install mono-mdk in OS X

 open /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/mono-mdk/4.0.2/MonoFramework-MDK-4.0.2.macos10.xamarin.x86.pkg 

(At the time of this writing, this was Mono 4.0.2, adjust the path from the previous command in consequence)

After that, all I had to do was type

env PATH=/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Commands:$PATH mono Maperitive.exe 

And maperitive launched!

I didn’t end up using maperitive (it does everything in RAM and does not scale well if you have a big OSM file), but I thought I might give the solution here.

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