geojson-vt
geojson-vt — GeoJSON Vector Tiles
A highly efficient JavaScript library for slicing GeoJSON data into vector tiles on the fly, primarily designed to enable rendering and interacting with large geospatial datasets on the browser side (without a server).
Created to power GeoJSON in Mapbox GL JS, but can be useful in other visualization platforms like Leaflet and d3, as well as Node.js server applications.
Resulting tiles conform to the JSON equivalent of the vector tile specification. To make data rendering and interaction fast, the tiles are simplified, retaining the minimum level of detail appropriate for each zoom level (simplifying shapes, filtering out tiny polygons and polylines).
Read more on how the library works on the Mapbox blog.
There’s a C++11 port: geojson-vt-cpp
Demo
Here’s geojson-vt action in Mapbox GL JS, dynamically loading a 100Mb US zip codes GeoJSON with 5.4 million points:
There’s a convenient debug page to test out geojson-vt on different data. Just drag any GeoJSON on the page, watching the console.
Usage
// build an initial index of tiles
var tileIndex = geojsonvt(geoJSON);
// request a particular tile
var features = tileIndex.getTile(z, x, y).features;
// show an array of tile coordinates created so far
console.log(tileIndex.tileCoords); // [{z: 0, x: 0, y: 0}, ...]
Options
You can fine-tune the results with an options object, although the defaults are sensible and work well for most use cases.
var tileIndex = geojsonvt(data, {
maxZoom: 14, // max zoom to preserve detail on; can't be higher than 24
tolerance: 3, // simplification tolerance (higher means simpler)
extent: 4096, // tile extent (both width and height)
buffer: 64, // tile buffer on each side
debug: 0 // logging level (0 to disable, 1 or 2)
indexMaxZoom: 5, // max zoom in the initial tile index
indexMaxPoints: 100000 // max number of points per tile in the index
});
By default, tiles at zoom levels above indexMaxZoom are generated on the fly, but you can pre-generate all possible tiles for data by setting indexMaxZoom and maxZoom to the same value, setting indexMaxPoints to 0, and then accessing the resulting tile coordinates from the tileCoords property of tileIndex.
GeoJSON-VT only operates on zoom levels up to 24.
Install
Install with NPM or Yarn (npm install geojson-vt), or use one of the CDN browser builds: