#tileservergl

[awesomearound]

Creating Offline Custom Style Maps With tileserver-gl

Hi lovely people! 👋 Last year, I saw a project on Product Hunt which allowed people to generate posters from maps. The website has since closed down and the company has been acquired by Airbnb. This is what the output looked like: Now, I was interested in figuring out how they were able to render this map. My experience with maps was limited to Google Maps only so I was excited to explore the world of custom map generation. I thought about this project for a while, tried working on it but quickly gave up because of how difficult it was to grasp the basics and get a map rendering pipeline running locally. It wasn’t until recently that I came across an article where the author used Mapbox Studio to create a blueprint style map. That post rekindled my interest in custom map generation and I knew that with the availability of Open Street Maps there is definitely an Open Source software which I can use. Offline rendering options: I could use tileserver-gl or openmaptiles. Both are developed by the same company. The difference is summed up by one of their sales people like this: OpenMapTiles Map Server is better suited for a production environment. It’s a complete package with caching and integrated map services (WMTS/WMS). It is also much easier to set up than TileServerGL. This is especially useful when working with vector map data (such as OpenMapTiles) and dynamically creating raster tiles from such data. Read the full article