Mapbox Tiling Service
- Create highly customized and performant vector and raster tilesets
- Reuse uploaded source data across multiple tilesets
- Generate tilesets with multiple layers and raster bands to optimize for performance and visualization
- Take advantage of new styles and visualizations in Mapbox GL
Mapbox Tiling Service (MTS) is a tool for creating vector and raster tilesets. With MTS, you use sets of configuration options (tileset recipes) to transform your geospatial data into tilesets. The resulting tilesets are hosted on Mapbox servers for use in your applications.
Vector tilesets are helpful if you want to visualize a large amount of data on a map quickly. When creating vector tiles, you can turn gigabytes of raw geospatial data into mere kilobytes, which can be critical for complex data visualizations since most modern browsers support loading about 100 MB of data at a time. And when you use MTS to create vector tiles, you have precise control over how your geospatial data is reduced into tiles.
Raster tilesets allow you to visualize and interact with raster data on a map. Data can be presented either as a standard image tile, like a webp, png, or jpg, or as a Mapbox Raster Tile (MRT).
Use cases
You can use MTS for many use cases. For example, you could use it to:
- Tile census boundaries to make interactive election visualizations.
- Add hiking paths, trails, or other roadways not included by default in Mapbox Streets to your map.
- Visualize activity data like runs or bike rides on a map.
- Add hotel or real estate properties and their attributes to a map.
- Create multi-layer tilesets (tilesets that contain up to 20 different data layers).
- Process and animate time-series weather data like temperature and pressure along with particle animation of wind.
Because MTS is hosted by Mapbox and designed to scale, you can build full, end-to-end data pipelines with it. It's the same service Mapbox uses internally to create our global, daily-updating basemap Mapbox Streets.
How to use MTS
MTS requires two inputs to make tiles: a tileset source (your geospatial data) and a tileset recipe (a JSON document that specifies the configuration options for turning the tileset source into tiles). Learn more about tileset sources in the Tileset sources guide. Learn about how to format tileset recipes using the Recipe specification
You can interact with MTS in two ways:
- Tilesets CLI: Flexible, powerful tool for preparing and uploading data
- MTS API endpoints: Access the API endpoints directly
Tilesets CLI
The Tilesets CLI is a command-line Python tool that allows you to prepare and upload data for MTS. To create an example tileset using the Tilesets CLI, follow the Get started using Mapbox Tiling Service and the Tilesets CLI tutorial.
We recommend using the Tilesets CLI if you have a large dataset that needs multipart uploads or your use case requires multiple tileset source files.
For more information about the Tilesets CLI, including all available commands, see the Tilesets CLI documentation.
MTS API endpoints
MTS has API endpoints for creating and interacting with tileset sources and tilesets. These endpoints are generally accessed using the Tilesets CLI tool, but you can also access them directly instead (for example, if you want to integrate MTS into an application so that you can make tilesets programmatically).
To learn more about these API endpoints, see the MTS API documentation.