PMTiles VS planetiler

I am a novice at GIS and mapping but when I got started I thought a map/tile server was the only way to build mapping webapps.

But, in my admittedly simple application PMTiles can cover a lot of my visualization use cases with a thing Django app doing GEOJson for interactive stuff.

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles

This is awesome. Such a great use case for nix.

I do a lot of geospatial processing in the cloud and I've been using Tippecanoe a lot to create vector tiles. It pairs well with PM Tiles for storing on the cloud. It seriously increases the web app performance for massive data sets. I queue these up with ECS tasks to process our json/csv/parquet input and create optimize vector tile outputs.

https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles

Tippecanoe would be a great addition to your nix packages. I've been thinking more and more about how Nix could fit into this pipeline.

Great work!

The thing being discussed is designed for cloud, so I think self managed is a better description?

https://protomaps.com/docs/cdn

Self hosting pmtiles is straightforward also, make a file available to a server that supports range requests:

https://protomaps.com/docs/pmtiles#2.-serve-your-file-locall...

It might've just been this: https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/tree/main/serverless/aws

There isn't a tool to do that right now. It could be a fit in either https://github.com/protomaps/go-pmtiles or https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/tree/main/python - the Go program is faster and more production ready at this point. I imagine if folders are working for you the quantity of tiles doesn't number into the millions, so the Python program might be sufficient.

Feel free to open an issue.

PMTiles

For the next revision of the JS decoder I'm including `fflate` as a dependency so clients can decompress gzipped tile data using JavaScript.

https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/blob/master/js/package....

Worth mentioning this project (https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler) that lets you create osm mbtiles and pmtiles pretty easy!

For a self-hosted vector tile stack you can have a look into https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler I found it very easy to get started and when you know the other stacks it is also very fast to create these vector tiles even for planet-scale.

(note, that I'm not affiliated with them, but they use some source code from us for the efficient import and also contributed to GraphHopper, but this did not influence my experience ;) )

> I wonder why so many seem to be moving away from raster tiles to vector data.

The flexibility of styling. And you can easily serve customers that need different default languages. This makes maps also more accessible for countries without Latin alphabet.

I used https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler and https://download.geofabrik.de, maybe it helps.

I spent a while optimizing sqlite inserts for planetiler, this is what I came up with:

https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/blob/db0ab02263baaa...

It batches inserts into bulk statements and is able to do writes in the 500k+ per second range, and reads are 300-400k/s using those settings.

Checkout https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler.

Super easy way to generate a MBTiles, which you can then serve directly, or further convert to PMTiles, which can be used to host vector tiles for client-side rendering using MapLibre (or other renderers).

Raster tiles are a lot harder because you have to generate them on the server, and that's a lot more resource intensive.

I built planetiler (https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler) for this purpose. The output up to z14 is ~80gb and depending on how big of a machine you have it takes from 30 minutes up to a few hours - no DB required, just java or docker. If you are only going to z11-12, it should be quite a bit faster/smaller.

Brandon from Protomaps is also helping add pmtiles output natively to planetiler, so you won't need a conversion step afterwards!

It's not raster directly, but you could use planetiler ( https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler ) to build a full planet vector map . Then you could use something like TileServer-GL to server the vector map with a style. TileServer-gl ( https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl) would provide a raster source that displays in the style you set on your vector map.

I recently left Twitter after 9 years, most recently serving as tech lead for the knowledge graph group (was 45 people). I helped apply the KG to drive a large portion of Twitter’s revenue and new product launches. In my spare time I do data visualization and web mapping, most recently https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler