go-pmtiles

The single-file utility for creating and working with PMTiles archives.

Installation

See Releases for your OS and architecture.

Creating PMTiles archives

Convert an MBTiles archive:

pmtiles convert INPUT.mbtiles OUTPUT.pmtiles

Upgrade a PMTiles version 2 to the latest version:

pmtiles convert INPUT.pmtiles OUTPUT.pmtiles

Uploading

Upload an archive to S3-compatible cloud storage:

# requires environment variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY credentials
pmtiles upload INPUT.pmtiles REMOTE.pmtiles --bucket=s3://BUCKET_NAME

Inspecting archives

pmtiles show INPUT.pmtiles
pmtiles show INPUT.pmtiles --bucket=s3://BUCKET_NAME

Serving Z/X/Y tiles

This section covers running a Z/X/Y tile server proxy for clients that read only those URLs. The simplest way to consume PMTiles on the web is directly in the browser: see the JavaScript examples.

Serve a directory of archives from local or cloud storage as a Z/X/Y endpoint:

pmtiles serve .
# serves at http://localhost:8077/FILENAME/{z}/{x}/{y}.mvt

pmtiles serve / --bucket=s3://BUCKET_NAME
pmtiles serve prefix --bucket=s3://BUCKET_NAME

For production usage, it's recommended to run behind a reverse proxy like Nginx or Caddy to manage HTTP headers (Access-Control-Allow-Origin, Cache-Control...) and SSL certificates.

pmtiles serve [FLAGS] BUCKET

• --cors=ORIGIN set the value of the Access-Control-Allow-Origin. * is a valid value but must be escaped in your shell. Appropriate for development use.
• --cache-size=SIZE_MB set the total size of the header and directory LRU cache. Default is 64 MB.
• --port=PORT specify the HTTP port.

Metadata is served at the URL path /<archive_name>/metadata.

Tiles are served at the URL path /<archive_name>/<z>/<x>/<y>.<ext>, where the extension <ext> is one of mvt, png, jpg, webp, avif.

Remote URLs

Cloud storage URLs can be any URL recognized by gocloud. Configure a custom endpoint and region:

s3://BUCKET_NAME?endpoint=https://example.com&region=REGION

You may need to escape special characters like & and ? in your shell.

Cloud Storage Permissions

To upload your files to AWS S3 you will need an IAM policy for writing/reading to a bucket, at minimum this:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "s3:*",
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::my-bucket-name/*"
        }
    ]
}