Creating Shortbread Vector Tiles
Shortbread Tiles can be created with Tilemaker.
Creating Shortbread vetor tiles is very simple. Install Tilemaker & the shortbread-tilemaker settings, get the OSM & external data, and run tilemaker!
Software required
Tilemaker
- Follow the Tilemaker installation instructions.
Extra software
You need ogr2ogr.
| OS | command |
|---|---|
| Debian/Ubuntu | sudo apt install gdal-bin |
| (Other OS) | (command) |
Get Shortbread-Tilemaker settings
Clone the Git repository of the vector tile schema from Github:
git clone https://github.com/shortbread-tiles/shortbread-tilemaker
Get Data
OpenStreetMap data
Tilemaker needs raw OpenStreetMap data as input. You can download it from:
- regional extracts from Geofabrik Download Service
- latest weekly planet PBF file from planet.openstreetmap.org or any of its mirrors
- regional extracts from download.openstreetmap.fr
Please try with a small extract first before you try to load the complete planet file.
Additional data
In the shortbread-tilemaker directory:
./get-shapefiles.sh
It will download a few required additional files into the data directory.
Generate Tiles
In the shortbread-tilemaker directory, run this command:
tilemaker --config config.json --process process.lua --bbox -180,-90,180,90 \
--input OSM_FILE.osm.pbf --output shortbread-tiles.mbtiles
The generated data is the shortbread-tiles.mbtiles file.
Output format
Tilemaker supports a few output formats. Here mbtiles is used.
BBox PBF files
If the .osm.pbf file contains a bounding box entry in its header (this is not
true for the planet), you can omit the --bbox -180,-90,180,90 part of the
tilemaker command. The generation process will be much faster for smaller
areas, and the output data will contain less “ocean tiles”, [[and be a little
bit smaller]]??
The error message Can't read shapefiles unless a bounding box is provided.
means you need to specify the --bbox option.
Memory
The above command uses the tilemaker default of storing things in memory. If you are running out of memory, you need the --store option, e.g. --store tilemaker.store.d/.
Read more in the tilemaker documentation about on-disk storage
Statistics
In February 2022, a server with a AMD EPYC 7452 32-Core Processor (2.35–3.35 GHz), 512 GB RAM, cache on NVMe and output to a loop-mounted hard disk drive (RAID 1) took 16:15 hours and needed up to 358 GB RAM to generate the whole planet.