ctrepka / pmtiles_basemaps Goto Github PK

You can preview the resulting maptiles and MVT style.json in this repo at the link below. NOTE: Due to Github LFS limitations, I decided to limit the footprint of the tiles the area of Austin, TX. This was done to enable hosting on GitHub Pages.

Preview Maptiles as hosted on Github Pages

With multiple maptile source providers moving toward a paid model, I began seeking alternative maptile layers for use at work. Nearly every 3rd party now charges a fee for retreiving maptiles.

While searching for static tile layer hosting methods, as opposed to the traditional model of chopping tiles into zoom level directories with tiles in each directory, I found the pmtiles spec. Curious to test this newer method of map tile hosting, I started with a small example hosted on GitHub. I was pleased to find that pmtiles were quick and simple to create from a source of vector data. In this case, open streetmaps are the originating source of streetmap data. PMTiles takes advantage of the HTTP Byte Range request header to select only a portion of a binary blob on a CDN. This effectively provides a "serverless" hosting solution for hosting scalable Mapbox Vector Tiles with little effort and very low costs, especially when using a cloud provider with zero egrees fees.

You can simple clone this repository and pull your own tiles using the command below. You will need to download and install the pmtiles CLI tool.

pmtiles extract <tile_src_url> <output_name>.pmtiles --bbox=<bbox_coordinates>

https://build.protomaps.com/20231001.pmtiles

-98.20541,30.79963,-97.24411,29.90493