PMTiles

PMTiles is a single-file archive format for tiled data. A PMTiles archive can be hosted on a commodity storage platform such as S3, and enables low-cost, zero-maintenance map applications that are "serverless" - free of a custom tile backend or third party provider.

Protomaps Blog: Dynamic Maps, Static Storage
PMTiles Inspector - inspect and preview PMTiles local or remote PMTiles archives.
- Archives on cloud storage may require CORS for the origin https://protomaps.github.io
Vector Tiles Example (US Zip Codes)

Demos require MapLibre GL JS v1.14.1-rc.2 or later

Creating PMTiles

Download the pmtiles binary for your system at go-pmtiles/Releases.

pmtiles convert INPUT.mbtiles OUTPUT.pmtiles
pmtiles upload OUTPUT.mbtiles s3://my-bucket?region=us-west-2 // requires AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY env vars to be set

Consuming PMTiles

JavaScript

See js/README.md for usage in Leaflet or MapLibre GL JS.

Go

See the go-pmtiles repository.

Python

See https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/tree/master/python/bin for library usage

Serverless

PMTiles on AWS Lambda

PMTiles on Cloudflare Workers

Specification

The current specification version is Version 3.

Recipes

Example of how to create a PMTiles archive from the Census Bureau Zip Code Tabulation Areas Shapefile using tippecanoe and the pmtiles-convert python program:

    # use GDAL/OGR to convert SHP to GeoJSON
    ogr2ogr -t_srs EPSG:4326 cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k.json cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k.shp
    # Creates a layer in the vector tiles named "zcta"
    tippecanoe -zg --projection=EPSG:4326 --no-tile-compression --no-feature-limit --no-tile-size-limit -o cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k_nolimit.mbtiles -l zcta cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k.json
    pmtiles convert cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k_nolimit.mbtiles cb_2018_us_zcta510_500k_nolimit.pmtiles

License

The reference implementations of PMTiles are published under the BSD 3-Clause License. The PMTiles specification itself is public domain, or under a CC0 license where applicable.

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