Localtiles

🗺️ Local-first tools for map tiles.

👷‍♂️ Caution: this is an experiment

🥔 There is no guarantee at all that this will work for you yet.

Localtiles is built with Hyperdrive and PMTiles to provide a way to share map tiles without a server.

Offline-first - An internet connection should not be needed once tiles are first downloaded (and there should be support for offline-friendly ways of sharing files).
Collaborative - Users should be able to create tilesets together (this one is very aspirational).
Fast - Using tiles from the local file system should be faster than using a web-based tiler.
Lightweight - Storage usage should be as minimal as possible. Only download tiles as they are needed and use storage formats that are as compact as possible.

Web - For now the focus is on creating a nodejs library that can be used in cli tools, desktop apps, and mobile apps. It may be possible to put effort into web support in the future, but that's not a priority. It's easy enough to take a PMTiles file stored in Localtiles and place it in an object storage service like s3. Tada! Web support.
mbtiles - Convert mbtiles into pmtiles!

See the nodejs and electron examples.

Beware: the electron example in particular is only a quick and dirty prototype.

These two examples work together to show:

creating a Localtiles tileset with a nodejs script
announcing that tileset with Hyperswarm
finding that tileset with Hyperswarm in an electron app
rendering tiles that are fetched from the tileset being shared by the nodejs script

These examples could be run on the same computer or from different parts of the world. No servers required. It's peer to peer!

clone this repo and cd into it
run npm i to install dependencies for the library
run node examples/nodejs/index.js to create a Localtiles tileset
open a new terminal window and cd examples/electron
run npm i to install dependencies for the desktop app
run npm run dev to start the desktop app
copy the key that was printed by the nodejs example
paste the key into the input in the desktop app
there may be a delay in the first connection that's being made over hyperswarm
after a moment tiles should appear!
in a real app these tiles would then be available offline any time. for now this is just a demo.