tilemaker VS planetiler

You can download an extract of your country from Geofabrik, run it through Tilemaker (https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker) to get a nice mbtiles file, and then use the built-in Ruby server to give you something you can load in your web-browser locally.

I ran into this solution last week on HN and decided to give it a try. The pipeline that got me up and running was geofabrik osm.pbf[0] downloads, pass those into tilemaker[1] to create mbtiles, and then pass those into pmtiles[2] to make the pmtiles.

[0]: https://download.geofabrik.de/index.html

[1]: https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker

[2]: https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles

Tilemaker

If you do vector tiles instead of raster, you could use tilemaker: https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker

Try to convert by GDAL files from geofabrik, ogr2ogr make my laptop hurt, but not tiles. Found tilemaker, looks better, but i get only markers, not images.

MBTiles is also a format that is supported more and more, something like tilemaker can help you with that. https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker

I'm trying to build offline maps for my app and I've figured out the app part. Now all thats left is getting the MBTiles file for all regions of the world and host it on my own somewhere. I tried to generate these files myself using [tilemaker](https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker) but I soon realised that with my limited computing power it would take forever to process 50GB worth of files for the entire planet.

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