Tilekiln

Background

Tilekiln is a set of command-line utilities to generate and serve Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVTs).

Generation relies on the standard method of a PostgreSQL + PostGIS server as a data source, and ST_AsMVT to serialize the MVTs.

The target use-case is vector tiles for OpenStreetMap Carto on openstreetmap.org, a worldwide complex basemap under high load.

Minutely updates are supported with an appropriately updating database.

Requirements

Tilekiln requires a PostGIS database with data loaded to generate vector tiles.

OpenStreetMap Carto's directions are a good starting place for loading OpenStreetMap data into a PostGIS database, but any PostGIS data source in EPSG 3857 will work.

• PostgreSQL 9.5+
• PostGIS 2.4+, 3.0 is strongly recommended

History

The tilekiln configuration syntax is based on studies and experience with other vector tile and map generation configurations. In particular, it is heavily inspired by Tilezen's use of Jinja2 templates and TileJSON for necessary metadata.

Tilekiln v0.0.x was written in Python and established the configuration format met all the requirements, but the implementation failed to scale on sufficiently powerful machines and the storage mechanisms had issues.

License

Code

Copyright © 2022 Paul Norman [email protected]

The code is licensed terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Documentation

The text of the documentation and configuration format specification is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. However, the use of the specification in products and code is entirely free: there are no royalties, restrictions, or requirements.

Sample configuration

The sample configuration files are released under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, version 1.0, as published by Creative Commons. To the extent possible under law, the author(s) have dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring rights to the Software to the public domain worldwide. The Software is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.

If you did not receive a copy of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication along with the Software, see http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/