mod_mbtiles

mod_mbtiles is an Apache module to serve tiles directly from an .mbtiles file using the familiar /tileset/z/x/y.ext path. Use it to serve your vector tiles made with tilemaker.

Serving directly from .mbtiles is fast, space-efficient and simple.

Installation

(Most of the commands below will require sudo unless you're root.)

You'll need Apache's module build tool (apxs) and sqlite3 (because .mbtiles are SQLite databases). Install them on Ubuntu/Debian with:

apt install apache2-dev libsqlite3-dev

Then to build the module and enable it:

apxs -lsqlite3 -i -a -c mod_mbtiles.c

Configuration

In your Apache config file, use MbtilesEnabled true to enable vector tile serving for that virtual host, and use MbtilesAdd to add each .mbtiles file. For example:

MbtilesEnabled true
MbtilesAdd vt "/path/to/my/vector_tiles.mbtiles"
MbtilesAdd dem "/path/to/my/dem.mbtiles"

This tells Apache to serve the first .mbtiles at /vt/z/x/y.pbf, and the second at /dem/z/x/y.png. Reload Apache (service apache2 reload) to pick up the config change and see it working!

Details

You can use mod_mbtiles to serve both vector (pbf) and raster (png/jpeg/webp) tiles. You don't need to configure this manually - it's automatically sensed from the metadata in your .mbtiles file.

Your vector tiles should be gzip compressed: mod_mbtiles will serve them with a Content-Encoding header.

Note that MbtilesEnabled is a per-directory/host setting, but MbtilesAdd is a global setting. So if you want to serve different tilesets from different hosts, make sure you use a different name for each.

There is a maximum of 20 tilesets. You can edit MAX_TILESETS in the source to change this.

Copyright

Richard Fairhurst, 2022. You may do what you want with this code and there is no warranty.

Based on and heavily expanded from mod_osm by Jean-Alexandre Peyroux.