Serving Cloud-Native Vector Tiles with PMTiles & Nginx

PMTiles packages an entire pyramid of Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT) into a single archive file. Instead of running a tile server backed by PostgreSQL, clients fetch only the byte ranges needed for the current viewport.

1. Generating a PMTiles Archive

tippecanoe -o parcels.pmtiles -Z6 -z15 --coalesce-densest-as-needed parcels.fgb

2. Static Serving

Any web server supporting HTTP Range requests (such as Nginx with default static file handling) can serve PMTiles directly to MapLibre GL JS with minimal memory overhead.