PMTiles
PMTiles is a single-file archive format for tiled data. A PMTiles archive can be hosted on a commodity storage platform such as S3, and enables low-cost, zero-maintenance map applications that are "serverless" - free of a custom tile backend or third party provider.
Demo - watch your network request log
See also:
How To Use
Python library: pip install pmtiles
pmtiles-convert TILES.mbtiles TILES.pmtiles
pmtiles-convert TILES.pmtiles DIRECTORY
pmtiles-show TILES.pmtiles // see info about a PMTiles directory
pmtiles-serve TILES.pmtiles // start an HTTP server that decodes PMTiles into traditional Z/X/Y paths
See https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/tree/master/python/bin for library usage
JavaScript usage:
Include the script:
<script src="https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/pmtiles.js"></script>
Example of a raster PMTiles archive decoded and displayed in Leaflet:
const p = new pmtiles.PMTiles('osm_carto.pmtiles',{allow_200:true})
p.leafletLayer({attribution:'ยฉ <a href="https://openstreetmap.org">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors'}).addTo(map)
Specification
A detailed specification is forthcoming. PMTiles is a binary serialization format designed for two main access patterns: over the network, via HTTP 1.1 Byte Serving (Range:
requests), or via memory-mapped files on disk.
Design considerations
- Directories are recursive, with a maximum of 21,845 entries per directory.
- 21845 is the total tiles of a pyramid with 8 levels, or 1+4+16+64+256+1024+4096+16384
- Deduplication of tile data is handled by multiple entries pointing to the same offset in the archive.
- The order of tile data in the archive is unspecified; an optimized implementation should arrange tiles on a 2D space-filling curve.
Details
- The first 512,000 bytes of a PMTiles archive are reserved, and contain the headers as well as a root directory.
- All integer values are little-endian.
- The headers begin with a 2-byte magic number, "PM"
- 2 bytes: the PMTiles specification version, right now always 1.
- 4 bytes: the length of metadata (M bytes)
- 2 bytes: the number of entries in the root directory (N)
- M bytes: the metadata, by convention a JSON object.
- N * 17 bytes: the root directory.
Directory structure
A directory is a sequence of 17 byte entries. An entry consists of:
- 1 byte: the zoom level (Z) of the entry, with the top bit set to 1 instead of 0 to indicate the data is a child directory, not tile content.
- 3 bytes: the X (column) of the entry.
- 3 bytes: the Y (row) of the entry.
- 6 bytes: the offset of where the data begins in the archive.
- 4 bytes: the length of the data.
License
The reference implementations of PMTiles are published under the BSD 3-Clause License. The PMTiles specification itself is public domain, or under a CC0 license where applicable.