mapt

mapt is an opinionated tool for building custom vector tiles with tilemaker. It can also help author MapLibre style sheets.

mapt aims for a more pleasant developer workflow:

• encourages thematic slices (e.g. land, roads, boundaries)
  • ⚡ iterate faster when developing
  • 🎯 create focused Lua files that are easier to understand
• humanizes JSON config
  • 🤝 use JSON6 for parsing .json files, so // and /* ... */ comments, trailing commas, and naked identifiers are supported
  • 🎨 optionally use Tailwind CSS colour palette names like red-50, red-100, etc, not raw hex codes
• works for dev or production
  • 🎶 in dev mode, mapt dynamically renders your full map based on several input pmtiles and style files
  • 🎵 in production mode, mapt produces a single pmtiles and style file, suitable for publishing to static hosting

Install

mapt requires Bun, whose install instructions are straight-forward.

bun install --global mapt

TODO: verify this works. The package is not yet published to npmjs, and file-local packages can't be installed globally.

Usage

mapt requires a specific file layout. Consider an example map that has been factored into land and water slices. It has this layout:

slices/land.json    # tilemaker config file
slices/land.lua     # tilemaker lua profile
slices/water.json   # tilemaker config file
slices/water.lua    # tilemaker lua profile
styles/style.json   # Root MapLibre style file into which other styles
                    # will be merged
styles/land.json    # Style file for land
styles/water.json   # Style file for water

You author your Lua profiles and style files modularly. mapt will intelligently combine them together as needed.

build

mapt build file.pbf land water

Build land.pmtiles and water.pmtiles with file.pbf as input.

Your tilemaker configuration will be read from slices/land.json, your Lua profile from layers/land.lua, etc.

--mbtiles

--mbtiles specifies that you want MBTiles output rather than the default PMTiles.

--no-output

--no-output abuses tilemaker zoom settings to avoid writing out tiles. This is useful if you just want the side effect of running your Lua code, for example, perhaps your Lua code creates a SQLite autosuggest index.

--single

--single specifies that your slices should be composited into a single Lua file. In this mode, a single tiles.pmtiles file is generated.

--no-output and --single may be used together.

serve

mapt serve

Launches a local web server to preview your tiles:

• http://localhost:8081
  • Shows your tile files and links to the PMTiles Viewer
• http://localhost:8081/map
  • Stitches your style files together and renders a map of your tiles.

style

mapt style https://path-to-your/tiles.pmtiles

Stitch your stylesheets into a single stylesheet, suitable for static hosting.

The algorithm for stitching styles is:

• start with styles/style.json as the root stylesheet
• for each other file in styles/*.json
  • merge its sources key, renaming sources to avoid conflicts with other style files
  • merge its layers key, prefixing id to avoid conflicts, and updating source-layer as needed
• sort the resulting layers entries by layer-z-index, then by their original order in the source style file
  • layer-z-index is the layer-specific zindex value defined in slices/*.json files

This approach constrains the expressiveness of your style files: style rules for a given layer cannot be interwoven with style rules for other layers. This is generally what you want, and failing to follow this rule can result in difficult to debug situations.