Create vector tiles with tippecanoe

In this article, I use felt/tippecanoe to create vector tiles. Because this fork supports new features that you can use FlatGeobuf as input and PMTiles as output.

However, some features are still under development. If you don't need new features, you can use mapbox/tippecanoe to create vector tiles with MBTiles as output.

Environment

tippecanoe v2.17.0
GDAL 3.5.1
Ubuntu 22.04

Installation

git clone https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe.git
cd tippecanoe
make -j
make install

Input data

You can use GeoJSON, Geobuf, CSV and FlatGeobuf (only felt/tippecanoe repository) as input format to create vector tiles.

In the previous article (Import OSM data through osm2pgsql flex output) , I use osm2pgsql flex output to import OSM highway data into PostGIS. This article will use these data as input source to create vector tiles.

Export FlatGeobuf from PostGIS through GDAL

I want to use FlatGeobuf as input format to tippecanoe. Because FlatGeobuf format has better performance than GeoJSON when reading and writing, and the file size is smaller.

More information about FlatGeobuf.

There are many different values under OpenStreetMap Key:highway to identify different roads. You can design layers and columns according to your needs.

About OpenStreetMap - Key:highway

In the following example, the motorway and motorway_link is filtered from the Key:highway through ogr2ogr and saved in Flatgeobuf format.

The type column in highway table is defined in the lua file when I import the data through osm2pgsql.

ogr2ogr \
  -f "FlatGeoBuf" \
  ./data/motorway.fgb \
  PG:"host=localhost dbname=osm user=yuchun password=my-password port=5432" \
  -sql "select * from highways where type in ('motorway', 'motorway_link');"

You can also pre-process the data at this stage. (Simplification, attribute calculation...)

Create vector tiles from FlatGeoBuf

tippecanoe has many options to generate vector tiles. You can refer to the official documentation to set options to custom your vector tiles.

Output to MBTiles

tippecanoe \
  --force \
  -Z6 \
  -z14 \
  --coalesce-densest-as-needed \
  ./data/motorway.fgb \
  -o ./data/motorway.mbtiles \
  -l "highways"

Output to PMTiles

tippecanoe \
  --force \
  -Z6 \
  -z14 \
  --coalesce-densest-as-needed \
  ./data/motorway.fgb \
  -o ./data/motorway.pmtiles \
  -l "highways"

Output to directory

tippecanoe \
  --force \
  -Z6 \
  -z14 \
  --coalesce-densest-as-needed \
  ./data/motorway.fgb \
  -pC \
  -e ./motorway_tiles \
  -l "highways"

Using your vector tiles in QGIS

MBTiles

If you output vector tiles as MBTiles, you can use tileserver-gl-light to host your MBTiles.

tileserver-gl-light ./data/motorway.mbtiles

The ZXY URL is http://localhost:8080/data/motorway/{z}/{x}/{y}.pbf

You can install tileserver-gl-light with npm install -g tileserver-gl-light.
If you want to change more behavior about tileserver-gl-light, you can follow TileServer GL documentation . The documentation has example about configuration file.

PMTiles

If you output vector tiles as PMTiles, you can use go-pmtiles to serve your directory of archives.

pmtiles serve ./data --port=8081

The URL is http://localhost:8081/motorway/{z}/{x}/{y}.mvt

You can download go-pmtiles from releases page.

Open your vector tiles in QGIS

Set the URL in QGIS to access your tiles.

You can also create a style.json to define layer style with mapbox style specification.

Add this layer into map.