Here you find a set of scripts (shell and R) for moving spatial data in Postgis to a MapBox account.

Dependencies

We have used:

• GNU Make 3.81

• GDAL 3.8.5

• tippecanoe v2.53.0 (https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe)

• R version 4.3.3 with mapboxapi_0.6

• pmtiles 1.19.2

• .pgpass a pgpass file at the ~/ is needed to specify host, user and password to connect to the PG database

Workflow

Shell and R scripts have been put together into a makefile. You can find more about this one with make help.

The top rule of the makefile will build it up to .mbtiles, after that it is your choice to send this tiles to Mapbox (make export_to_MB).

For the first run you will need to copy config.mk.example to config.mk and update the input arguments (table name, maximum zoom, and minium zoon). The make file will use these values to specify the table you convert to tiles (MY_TABLE) and both zoom levels (MAX_Z and MIN_Z, by default 11 and 9).

We are using (hence you need to have them install):

1. GDAL's ogr2ogr to convert PG to geojson (convert_to_geosjon.sh)

2. tippecanoe -> convert geojson to mbtiles

Here you an have option for polygons (make tiling) and an other one for points (make point_tiles)

3. R with the mapboxapi wrapper to send tiles to mapbox

4. Optional pmtiles can be generated (make pmtiling)

Resources:

R's mapboxapi: https://walker-data.com/mapboxapi/

On tippecanoe: https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe

Useful bits of knowledge:

• -P or --read-parallel is only an option when using line-delimited JSON

• 50,000 features in the densest tile is the default

• 500K size limit per tile

• -ab or --detect-shared-borders can be used to reduce the size of polygon by using same simplification on shared borders

pmtiles: https://protomaps.com/

I moved the pmtiles binary to /usr/local/bin

see pmtiles --help for more

Blog post from Miles Mcbain:

• https://www.milesmcbain.com/posts/vector-tiles/

• https://github.com/qfes/mapbox-tile-server the repo of their server

More on mbtiles/geojson : https://ckochis.com/create-custom-vector-tiles

Mabpbox documentation : https://docs.mapbox.com/data/tilesets/guides/vector-tiles-standards/#encoding-attributes

this repo has a lot going on: https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles/