python-mbtiles

Some python tools for working with mbtiles:

MBTiles is a specification for storing tiled map data in SQLite databases for immediate use and for transfer. The files are designed for portability of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of standard map tile images in a single file.

Similar projects

This is nothing more than an experiment at this point. For more full-featured libraries, you may also want to check out

• mbutil
• landez

Project Goals

Python classes

Abstract the details of accessing utfgrid and image data from the sqlite datastore. See mbtiles.py

tileset = MbtileSet(mbtiles='./data/road-trip-wilderness.mbtiles')
zoom, col, row = 6, 9, 40
tile = tileset.get_tile(zoom, col, row)
binary_png = tile.get_png()
text_json = tile.get_json()

Tile web server

Provide a fast, simple, non-blocking web server (using Tornado) to serve image and utfgrid data. You are able to pass a callback parameter on utfgrids for dynamic JSONP allowing easy cross-domain and framework-agnostic loading of utfgrid json tiles. See serve_mbtiles.py

python serve_mbtiles.py # runs on 8988
wget http://localhost:8988/test/6/9/40.png
wget http://localhost:8988/test/6/9/40.json
wget http://localhost:8988/test/6/9/40.json?callback=test
wget http://localhost:8988/test/6/9/23.json?origin=top # invert y-axis for top-origin tile scheme like Google, etc.

Covert mbtiles to png/json files

A script to convert mbtiles files into png/json files on the filesystem. This eliminates the single-file advantages of mbtiles but gains portability in that tiles can be served statically without a web server in front of it. See mbtiles2files.py.

# Bottom-origin tiles (TMS)
python mbtiles2files.py -f data/road-trip-wilderness.mbtiles -o /tmp/output
ls /tmp/output/6/9/40.*

# Invert to top-origin tiles (Google, OSM, etc.)
python mbtiles2files.py -f data/road-trip-wilderness.mbtiles -o /tmp/output --invert
ls /tmp/output/6/9/23.*

Example

Roadmap

• Make error handling more robust
• Config file for the server (port, list of mbtiles to serve)
• Handle jpg (coding was stupidly implemented assuming png)
• Test cases, docs
• setup.py file, cheesehop it, etc.