A field guide for the engineers who own the path from raw spatial data to the pixels in a user's browser.

🌐 www.vector-tile.com

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.

Eighty-nine in-depth pages — 24 topics and 61 guides — across four connected tracks:

The MVT protobuf encoding, the Web Mercator tiling grid, MBTiles vs PMTiles storage, coordinate systems, TileJSON metadata, 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, layer composition with tile-join, incremental partitioned builds, and CI/CD automation for repeatable, gated tile generation.

MapLibre GL JSON contracts, data-driven expression binding, sprite and glyph pipelines, 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 the observability that shows whether the edge is actually caching.

• 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
• Inline SVG figures built by lib/figures.js, whose geometry is derived from each figure's data so labels cannot collide or clip, and whose interiors repaint through the palette in both light and dark themes
• Light and dark themes driven by CSS custom properties, with an accessible toggle that follows the OS preference until the reader chooses
• 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