Tippecanoe is an open source command line tool for creating Mapbox Vector Tiles. It runs only on unix environments like MacOS and Linux - so if you need to make maps with large vector data from geojson, shapefiles, or similar - you're hosed if you're on Windows.
- Create vector tiles of massive vector data on a Windows 10 machine
- Windows 10 personal, pro, or server OS
- Admin rights on the machine you're installing on
- Install Ubuntu 14.04+ or more recent
- Install the Ubuntu Linux Bash shell from the Microsoft Store. Follow the tutorial here.
- Make sure to setup your UNIX username and password to something that you'll remember. Store it in your password manager!
- Open the Ubuntu Bash terminal on your Windows machine once everything is installed.
- Change directory to your
C:/drive in your Ubuntu shell -cd ../../mnt/c. This should put you in the directory/mnt/con your Windows C:/ drive. - Install
gitto download the latest Tippecanoesudo apt-get install software-properties-commonsudo apt-add-repository ppa:git-core/ppasudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install gitsudo apt-get install unzipsudo apt-get install wget- (if for some reason you have issues with git, you can download the Tippecanoe code to use in the next step directly for version 1.34.0 using
wget https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe/archive/1.34.0.zip && unzip 1.34.0.zip
- Install Tippecanoe
- Prereqs
sudo apt-get install build-essential libsqlite3-dev zlib1g-dev-
sudo apt-get update -y sudo apt-get install -y g++-5 export CXX=g++-5```
git clone https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe.gitcd tippecanoemakesudo make install
- Prereqs
- Check your install was successful
tippecanoe --version
- Now Tippecanoe is installed, and you can run it from your Ubuntu bash terminal on any files you have on your Windows machine.
- EX I have a geojson file containing polygons representing US ACLU districts in Flordia. I can now tile it using this command:
tippecanoe -P -ab -o out.mbtiles --coalesce-densest-as-needed --extend-zooms-if-still-dropping -zg --generate-ids -f -l "districts" Florida_63_to_63.geojson
- EX I have a geojson file containing polygons representing US ACLU districts in Flordia. I can now tile it using this command:
Before this was published, I found steps to do something similar using cygwin64 in place of Ubuntu:
https://github.com/GISupportICRC/ArcGIS2Mapbox#installing-tippecanoe-on-windows
I then found that if you leave the folder C:\cygwin64\home{your username}\tippecanoe in place, and also add C:\cygwin64\home to your System PATH environment variable, you can then run tippecanoe directly from the windows command line, e.g.
C:\cygwin64\home{your username}\tippecanoe\tippecanoe
This can be useful for integration with other tools e.g. command scripts, python.
But the bigger issue is - this is all too hard for even a somewhat technical windows user: too many steps and easy to trip up along the way. Given the widespread use of Windows, and the common need for tippecanoe to get usable results in Mapbox, this seems a limiting factor to the uptake of Mapbox.