PostgreSQL Software Recommendations – Best Tools for Creating Vector MBTiles

mapboxmbtilespostgresqlsoftware-recommendationsvector-tiles

I am searching for a tool to generate vector-tiles that I can then display using the Mapbox Map-View.

We currently have a PostgreSQL database with all of our data.

What is the best tool to generate vector mbtile tiles?

What would be awesome it a tool where we can (ideally with a GUI) define what kind of data is embedded into the tiles at which zoom level.

If we could gather the information from our PostgreSQL database would also be cool, so we can pack all the information we need into the vector tiles.

Best Answer

POSTGIS now supports outputting vector tiles as endpoint to a Query. https://postgis.net/docs/ST_AsMVT.html I honestly don't recommend this approach because currently that's just geometry and no attributes.

You can also pair POSTGIS with GeoServer and GeoWebCache to produce vector tiles but also don't recommend that.

But probably your best bet now is that GDAL 2.3 supports Writting Vector Tiles both in Folder of XYZ PBF and inside sqlite3 container mbtiles. https://www.gdal.org/drv_pg.html OGR2OGR can read from your POSTGIS database and write an mbtiles. It's slower than Tippecanoe and has less options. So you may also want to use MapBox Tippecanoe which is also free and open source. Tippecanoe can be run on Windows SubSystem for Linux (WSL) Bash Ubuntu (as well as Linux and Mac operating systems). It will require the data to be in GeoJSON (and CSV is supported) file to convert to vector tiles. Tippecanoe also has GeoJSON extensions for Zoom Level and Layer Name so you can have super granular control over the production of vector tiles. For polygons use the -pD option to not show tile boundaries and for most of the time don't do buffers. https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe

When producing vector tiles pay lots of attention to the attributes (Keys and Values) you are including if you are not using it as a label or popup in the map don't include it otherwise they get huge. Almost All JavaScript mapping engines now support rendering Vector Tiles some require plugins.

Go with MapBox GL JS or ESRI ArcGIS JavaScript API for the easiest integration and access to MapBox GL JSON Stylesheet support. You can serve vector tiles with just an S3 Bucket if uploading a folder of PBF's or use a tileserver with MBTILES file. I like TileServer-GL https://github.com/klokantech/tileserver-gl or TileStrata https://github.com/naturalatlas/tilestrata because you can deliver PNG tiles to clients that don't support vector tiles.
One last point is that you can use ESRI ArcGIS Pro to create vector tiles so you can connect your POSTGIS database. You need to create a Vector Tile Package VTPK and then convert that to mbtiles or extract to folder.

Related Solutions

Shapefiles to Mapbox Vector Tiles Conversion

mapbox-tile-copy will convert shapefiles (and a bunch of other formats) to Mapbox Vector Tiles on Amazon S3.

There is also tippecanoe to create an mbtiles of vector tiles from your shapefile.

Geoserver – Finding Layer Names Within Vector Tiles Without TileJSON

If you're okay to write a NodeJS script you can use

const request = require('request');
const VectorTile = require('@mapbox/vector-tile').VectorTile;
const Pbf = require('pbf');
const zlib = require('zlib');

request({
    url: 'https://example.com/1/2/3.pbf',
    encoding: null

}, (err, response, body) => {
    try {
         body = zlib.gunzipSync(body);
    } catch (e) {

    }
    const tile = new VectorTile(new Pbf(body));
    console.log('Vector source layers found: ', Object.keys(tile.layers).join(', '))
})

https://github.com/mapbox/vector-tile-js#api-reference

Try this on Runkit: https://runkit.com/stevebennett/get-layer-names-and-keys-from-vector-tile

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shapefiles to Mapbox Vector Tiles Conversion

Geoserver – Finding Layer Names Within Vector Tiles Without TileJSON

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