Overture Tiles

Create tilesets from Overture Maps data.

Overview

This project provides tools to create vector tilesets in PMTiles format from Overture Maps data using a combination of Planetiler and Tippecanoe. It includes AWS CDK constructs for deploying the necessary infrastructure to generate and host the tilesets.

Note: Currently focused on AWS infrastructure (S3 & Batch), though the core processing runs in Docker containers

Project Structure

The repository is organized into the following main components:

• Infrastructure: AWS CDK constructs to deploy the processing and hosting infrastructure.
• Profiles: Profiles for Planetiler to define how to process Overture Maps data into vector tiles.
• Scripts: Scripts are recipes to run Tippecanoe with specific configurations for generating PMTiles.

Architecture

The tile generation pipeline follows a three-stage process:

1. Download: Fetches Overture Maps data from the official S3 release (specified via RELEASE environment variable) or a custom S3 source (via SOURCE_OVERRIDE for internal testing). When using RELEASE, optionally supports geographic filtering using bounding boxes (BBOX environment variable) for smaller regional extracts.

2. Transform: Processes the downloaded data into PMTiles format using theme-specific profiles and scripts (see Profiles and Scripts section below).

3. Upload: Publishes the generated PMTiles to a specified S3 bucket (OUTPUT environment variable).

This pipeline runs on AWS Batch, which provides on-demand, scalable compute resources for processing large geospatial datasets without maintaining dedicated infrastructure. Batch jobs automatically scale based on workload, handle compute provisioning and only incur costs during active tile generation.

Environment Variables

The Docker container accepts the following environment variables:

Variable	Required	Description
RELEASE	Yes*	Overture Maps release version (e.g., 2025-11-19.0). *Required unless SOURCE_OVERRIDE is set.
OUTPUT	Yes	S3 bucket path for uploading generated PMTiles
THEME	Yes	Theme to process (base, transportation, buildings, addresses, places, or divisions)
BBOX	No	Bounding box for regional extracts (format: minLon,minLat,maxLon,maxLat). Only works with RELEASE.
SOURCE_OVERRIDE	No	Custom S3 path for input data (for internal use). Overrides RELEASE if set.
S3_REGION	No	S3 region for custom sources (defaults to us-west-2)
SKIP_UPLOAD	No	Set to true to skip S3 upload (useful for local testing)

Profiles and Scripts

Profiles and scripts define how Overture Maps data is processed into vector tiles:

• Planetiler profiles: Used for base, transportation, buildings, and addresses themes. See profiles/ for details.
• Tippecanoe scripts: Used for places and divisions themes. See scripts/ for details.

Currently, these are fixed within the Docker image. There are ideas to support custom profiles and scripts in the future.

Deploying to AWS

The CDK stack creates AWS Batch infrastructure for processing tiles at scale. Configure your S3 bucket and AWS account in overture-tiles-cdk/bin/overture-tiles-cdk.ts, then deploy with standard CDK commands or use the justfile recipes.

For detailed deployment instructions, see the Overture Tiles documentation.

Development

Prerequisites

To work with this project locally, you'll need:

• Docker - For running the tile generation container
• AWS CLI - For deployment and S3 operations (optional for local testing)
• Just - Command runner for development tasks (optional but recommended)

Testing Locally

You can test the tile generation process locally using Docker. Set the SKIP_UPLOAD environment variable to true to skip the upload step.

Using the justfile (recommended):

just test-local places

Or manually with Docker:

docker build -t overture-tiles:test .
docker run --name overture-test \
    -v $(pwd):/data \
    -e RELEASE='2025-11-19.0' \
    -e OUTPUT='noop' \
    -e THEME='places' \
    -e BBOX='-122.5247,37.7081,-122.3569,37.8324' \
    -e SKIP_UPLOAD='true' \
    overture-tiles:test
docker rm overture-test

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md for details.