Django Tiles GL

Integrated Django Vector Tile Server based on mbtiles.

Description

Simple app to serve Mabpox Vector Tiles directly from MBTiles files via Django views.

Django Tiles has a minimal dependencies. It does not require GeoDjano or any other libraries. Its only dependency is Django itself.

Django Tiles GL does not create raster tiles. It may only be used with map libraries that support to render vector tiles like MapLibre or OpenLayers.

Django Tiles GL contains the OSM Bright map style which can be used to render Vector Tiles following the OpenMapTiles vector tile schema.

Note that this default style is using OpenSans fonts which does only contain Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets.

Other tile schemes are possible by creating a custom map style specification and referencing Django Tiles GL TileJSON endpoint as a source.

Usage

See the demo Django application for a simple usage example.

Setup

• Add django_tiles_gl to you INSTALLED_APPS setting.
• Add django_tiles_gl.urls to your url patterns. For example with the tiles prefix:

  urlpatterns = [
      ...
      path("tiles/", include("django_tiles_gl.urls")),
  ]
  

• Set path to your MBTiles files in you application settings.

  MBTILES_DATABASE = BASE_DIR / "demo" / "data" / "berlin.mbtiles"
  

• Optionally set the default center to be set on the default map style.

  MBTILES_CENTER = [13.4, 52.5, 13]   # [longitude, latitude, zoom]
  

• Optionally force absolute urls to use SSL by prefixing them with "https://". This might be required if you app is running behind a reverse proxy and you are not able to set SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER from the SSL enabled proxy server.

  MBTILES_FORCE_SSL = True
  

Views

To render a map you have to include a JavaScript mapping library and refer to the tile endpoint or the default integrated style.

Django Tiles GL provides the following endpoints:

• {% url 'django_tiles_gl:openmaptiles_style' %} - Default OpenMapTiles style defintion using the OSM Bright map style.
• {% url 'django_tiles_gl:tilejson' %} - TileJSON describing the configured MBTiles files and providing the correct tile urls.
• {% url 'django_tiles_gl:tile' x y z %} - Actual tile endpoint, returning vector data in the PBF format.

Django Tiles GL is bundles with MapLibre and provides a template tag for easy inclusion. A minimal working example has to contain the following defintions:

{% load tiles_gl_tags %}
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    {% maplibre_head %}

    <style>
        body { margin:0; padding:0; }
        #map { position:absolute; top:0; bottom:0; width:100%; }
    </style>
</head>
<body>

<div id='map'></div>

<script>
var map = new maplibregl.Map({
	container: 'map',
	style: '{% url 'django_tiles_gl:openmaptiles_style' %}',
});
</script>

</body>
</html>

Data / MBTiles generation

There are mutiple tools to generate valid MBTiles databases. The easiest to use with Django Tiles GL is OpenMapTiles as it is compatible with the bundled default style.

For a quickstart you may generate the MbTiles for an area with the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles.git
cd openmaptiles
./quickstart.sh <area>

Fo further information and optiones see https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles

Further Topics

Caching

It is advised setup a caching proxy for the tile endpoint. Please refer to you HTTP servers documentation. For example the nginx proxy cache config

Other Django tile server solutions

• django-geojson-tiles - Generates GeoJSON tiles from a GeoDjango model. No MBTiles support. Not to be used as a base layer.

• django-vectortiles - Generates Vector Tile layers from GeoDjango. No MBTiles support. Not to be used as a base layer.

• django-mbtiles - Uses MBTiles to generate rastered tiles and UTFGrid. Does not support modern vector tiles. Strong inspiration for this project.