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Comment by lukeqsee | Hacker News Reader

This is really awesome to see.

I'm involved in many of these projects (helped get MapLibre started, wrote a library supporting PMTiles, have used OpenMapTiles for years), and to see open-source, open-data win in the end is really satisfying.

If anyone has any questions about how you could do this for yourself, I'm happy to answer! (I have a company offering SaaS maps, but we know SaaS isn't for everyone, and are happy to point people the right direction when self-hosting is what you want.)

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Thanks for all your work on MapLibre, along with all the other contributors! I use MapLibre extensively in an open source and non-profit transit data aggregator and everyone keeps being blown away by how smoothly the map runs, even with tens of thousands of points.

We burn through MapTiler free tiles on a regular basis and have been looking to migrate to self-hosting, but somehow PMTiles flew under my radar and every other approach seemed to either still rely on MapTiler for data (where you have to chose between outdated or expensive) or just be a huge pain to set up. Hopefully this finally solves our map issues so we can actually start promoting the project without fear of the map disappearing in the first week every month.

My company may be able to help save you the trouble of self-hosting. We do have a free tier (for non-commercial / test usage), and our pricing structure allows you to save quite a bit compared to MapTiler.

Stadia Maps, right? Your pricing is better than MapTiler, but both have the same issues for us - there's a significant jump from free to paid (no pay-as-you-go option) and server-side caching is prohibited. Both of these are completely sensible business decisions, but don't make sense for us specifically.

We have plenty of server resources from both our local partners and various cloud providers that have non-profit grants, but basically no regular budget to spend on SaaS, so self-hosting everything is the only thing that makes sense.

Ah, that makes sense.

I'd take a look at https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler -- I bet that fits the bill for what you need if you have the servers but need the data. :)

Is there a standard folder tree of tiles -> PMTiles archiver or is that the wrong question to be asking?

I don't think so. There's this: https://github.com/protomaps/go-pmtiles to get from MBTiles and there's a few xyz folder tree tools to get mbtiles from that structure (e.g., https://pypi.org/project/mbutil/). So you can get there, but I don't know of a good straight-line right now.

Thanks a lot. I developed and support a standalone desktop application which contains customer-specific tiled maps, and it can get unwieldy.

A pivot at some point to these types of archives is an option, but I'd like to roll forward existing customers as well.

If you have access to SQLite in your desktop application then there isn't any big wins from using PMTiles over MBTiles; PMTiles does have some special design around tile-deduplication but this is possible in MBTiles too by using table views.

There isn't a tool to do that right now. It could be a fit in either https://github.com/protomaps/go-pmtiles or https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/tree/main/python - the Go program is faster and more production ready at this point. I imagine if folders are working for you the quantity of tiles doesn't number into the millions, so the Python program might be sufficient.

Feel free to open an issue.

Not in the millions no - 100k would be a reasonable order of magnitude.

I'll take a look to see if MBTiles will get me there and if not I'll come back to these.

Thanks heaps

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