Developer Guide: Working on maps

Vector maps (Mapbox GL)

The manager has built in support for Mapbox GL and can serve vector tile data for this to work please ensure that you have the following files available in the deployment folder:

• map/mapsettings.json - Contains settings related to the map tiles source data and also UI rendering settings (e.g. center point of map when first loaded)
• map/mapdata.mbtiles - Contains the vector map data (see Creating a custom project](./Developer-Guide:-Creating-a-custom-project) for more details)

If you have the map data and/or settings in a different location then please ensure that the manager environment variables are set also:

MAP_TILES_PATH=../deployment/map/mapdata.mbtiles
MAP_SETTINGS_PATH=../deployment/map/mapsettings.json

Raster Maps (Mapbox JS)

If you are working on raster maps (Mapbox JS) then you will need to have the map docker container running, this container serves the raster map tiles from the vector map data.

The container can be started by using the dev-map.yml profile (see here) or you can add a map service to an existing custom project profile (copy the dev-map.yml as a template).

The manager acts as a reverse proxy for the map service and in order to configure the manager to serve raster tiles you need to set the following environment variables:

MAP_TILESERVER_HOST=localhost
MAP_TILESERVER_PORT=8082
MAP_TILESERVER_REQUEST_TIMEOUT=10000

NOTE: By default MAP_TILESERVER_HOST is null which means the reverse proxy is disabled

Updating Map data

We currently do not have our own pipeline for extracting/converting OSM data into vector tilesets but depend on the extracts offered on https://openmaptiles.org/.

You can extract smaller tilesets with the following procedure:

1. Install tilelive converter: npm install -g mapnik mbtiles tilelive tilelive-bridge
2. Select and copy boundary box coordinates of desired region: http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#tab=1
3. Extract the region with: tilelive-copy --minzoom=0 --maxzoom=14 --bounds="BOUNDARY BOX COORDINATES" theworld.mbtiles myextract.mbtiles