A field guide for the engineers who own the path from raw spatial data to the pixels in a user's browser.
Vector tiles are the backbone of modern interactive web maps — but the pipeline that produces and delivers them is deep, tool-heavy, and sparsely documented. This site is a practical, code-first reference for building and operating that pipeline end to end: converting GeoJSON and GeoParquet into optimized PMTiles and MBTiles, tuning Tippecanoe for production, synchronizing MapLibre GL styles with your tile schema, and serving it all through a CDN that actually caches.
Every page leads with the actionable detail — real flags, real commands, spec tables, and copy-pasteable Python and bash — because the audience skips the intro and wants the answer.
Fifty-plus in-depth pages across four connected tracks:
The MVT protobuf encoding, the Web Mercator tiling grid, MBTiles vs PMTiles storage, coordinate systems, and zoom-level optimization — the ground truth that determines what a tile can contain.
The Tippecanoe flag taxonomy, GeoParquet ingestion with pyarrow and DuckDB, geometry simplification, attribute filtering, and CI/CD build automation for repeatable, gated tile builds.
MapLibre GL JSON contracts, data-driven expression binding, theme inheritance, layer-filter synchronization, and validation workflows that keep tiles and styles in lock-step as schemas evolve.
Tile servers (Martin, tileserver-gl, pg_tileserv), PMTiles range-request delivery from Cloudflare R2 and Amazon S3, cache-control headers, versioned URL rotation, and CDN invalidation for fast, cheap delivery at scale.
- Frontend GIS developers wiring MapLibre GL to a tileset and debugging why a layer renders blank.
- Mapping platform engineers who own tile generation, storage, and delivery infrastructure.
- Python automation builders streaming GeoParquet into Tippecanoe inside a CI pipeline.
- Cartography teams balancing tile-size budgets against rendering fidelity across zoom levels.
A fully static site — fast, cacheable, and dependency-light:
- Eleventy (11ty) static site generator
- Markdown content with a content-tree-driven navigation, breadcrumb, and interlinking model
- Hand-authored inline SVG diagrams that adapt to light and dark themes via
currentColor - Prism syntax highlighting, JSON-LD structured data, and a strict per-build QA gate suite (accessibility, structured-data, link integrity, performance budgets, and more)
- Deployed on Cloudflare Pages
npm install
npm run serve # local dev server with live reload
npm run build # production build to _site/Spotted an error, an outdated flag, or a technique worth adding? Open an issue — corrections and suggestions from practitioners are welcome.
Built and maintained by vector-tile · www.vector-tile.com