You can combine OpenMapTiles with your custom vector data saved in PostGIS database (there is the separate article for data stored in ShapeFile or GeoJSON). The easiest way is to convert your data into vector tiles and then combine it with standard OpenMapTiles source in a map style. The big advantage of this approach is that you don’t need to generate the whole OpenMapTiles schema which is quite time-consuming.

Create vector tiles from PostGIS

This approach is a bit more complicated to set up then in the case of data stored in ShapeFile or GeoJSON. On the other hand, it gives you even bigger control over tiles generation and you can use SQL syntax a lot of people is familiar with.

Before importing the data into PostGIS

First, you need to install Docker and Docker Compose and to clone OpenMapTiles repository as described here (space and memory requirements are not so high in this case).

Add data directory as another volume of postgres service in docker-compose.yml:

services:
  postgres:
    image: "openmaptiles/postgis:2.3"
    volumes:
    - pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    - ./data:/data
    ...

Run the database container:

docker-compose up -d postgres

Import the data into PostGIS

Move your data into data/ directory and ensure it was set to EPSG:3857 coordinate system. You can use ogr2ogr for transformation:

ogr2ogr -f "ESRI ShapeFile" your_data_in_3857.shp -t_srs EPSG:3857 your_data.shp

Files inside data/ directory are visible from Docker container. Get into the postgres container:

docker-compose run --rm postgres bash

and import your data into PostgreSQL database by shp2pgsql utility:

shp2pgsql -s 3857 -I -g geometry /data/your_data_in_3857.shp your_table_name > /data/your_data.sql
PGPASSWORD=openmaptiles psql --host=postgres --port=5432 --dbname=openmaptiles --username=openmaptiles -f /data/your_data.sql | grep -v "INSERT 0 1"

Inside the container, you can run

psql postgresql://openmaptiles@postgres/openmaptiles

to get into the database and check if the data was imported correctly.

Run exit to exit from a container.

Configure OpenMapTiles

The next step is to configure OpenMapTiles project to generate tiles from your data. Basically, you need to

• create layer definition of your data
• change openmaptiles.yaml so that it contains only your layer(s)
• create data/docker-compose-config.yml with zoom range and the bounding box of generated tiles

Create custom layer definition

The layer definition might be the most complicated step depending on how many logic you want to implement. The very simple example consists of two files:

layers/pubtran/pubtran.yaml:

layer:
  id: "pubtran"
  description: |
      Links of Public Transport in Prague.
  buffer_size: 4
  fields:
    number:
      description: |
          Number of the link.
    number:
      description: |
          Category of the link.
  datasource:
    geometry_field: geometry
    query: (SELECT geometry, custom_attribute FROM layer_pubtran(!bbox!, z(!scale_denominator!))) AS t
schema:
  - ./layer.sql

layers/pubtran/layer.sql:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION layer_pubtran(bbox geometry, zoom_level int)
RETURNS TABLE(geometry geometry, custom_attribute text) AS $$
    SELECT geometry, custom_attribute
    FROM your_table_name
    WHERE geometry && bbox;
$$ LANGUAGE SQL IMMUTABLE;

For a better understanding of this example, check the documentation to get inspiration in defining your own OpenMapTiles layers used in production.

Change openmaptiles.yaml

Change openmaptiles.yaml to contain only your layer(s). It may look like this:

tileset:
  layers:
    - layers/pubtran/pubtran.yaml
  name: OpenMapTiles
  version: 3.3.0
  id: pubtran
  description: "Sample tileset of Prague Public Transportation"
  attribution: '<a href="http://opendata.praha.eu" target="_blank">&copy; OpenStreetMap contributors</a>'
  center: [14.403076, 50.043029, 4]
  maxzoom: 14
  minzoom: 0
  defaults:
    srs: +proj=merc +a=6378137 +b=6378137 +lat_ts=0.0 +lon_0=0.0 +x_0=0.0 +y_0=0.0 +k=1.0 +units=m +nadgrids=@null +wktext +no_defs +over
    datasource:
      srid: 900913

You should change at least attribution and center properties.

Create data/docker-compose-config.yml

Create data/docker-compose-config.yml with zoom range and bounding box of generated tiles:

version: "2"
services:
  generate-vectortiles:
    environment:
      BBOX: "14.224435,49.941898,14.706787,50.177433"
      OSM_MAX_TIMESTAMP : "2017-04-19T20:14:29Z"
      OSM_AREA_NAME: "prague"
      MIN_ZOOM: "0"
      MAX_ZOOM: "14"

You can get the bounding box easily with http://boundingbox.klokantech.com/.

Generate your tiles

Run these commands to create/update other configuration files needed for generating:

docker run -v $(pwd):/tileset openmaptiles/openmaptiles-tools make clean
docker run -v $(pwd):/tileset openmaptiles/openmaptiles-tools make
docker-compose run --rm import-sql

Finally generate your tiles:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f ./data/docker-compose-config.yml  run --rm generate-vectortiles

Your MBTiles file is now in data/tiles.mbtiles. You can preview it using TileServer-GL:

docker run -it -v $(pwd):/data -p 8080:80 klokantech/tileserver-gl data/tiles.mbtiles

Combine your vector tiles with OpenMapTiles

After creating vector tiles, you can combine them with the standard OpenMapTiles layer in one map style. It can be done in the same way as in case of raster tiles.