What is this?

A nginx module to serve map tiles directly from mbtiles container files. This is a fast, low-resource way to serve many mbtiles files (tested with 11,000 mbtiles files on a 2 GB/1 CPU VPS), especially if the contents of those file changes regularly: nginx performs the open/fetch calls on each request, so adding new mbtiles files or updating their contents requires no action on your part for those to be served immediately.

Nginx configuration example

• mbtiles_file - points to the mbtiles file

You'll need to add load_module modules/ngx_http_mbtiles_module.so; to the root of your nginx.conf file.

  location ~ ^/(.*?)/(.*?)/(.*?)/(.*?)$ {
      root /var/www/tiles/tilesets;
      mbtiles_file "$document_root/$1.mbtiles";
      mbtiles_zoom "$2";
      mbtiles_column "$3";
      mbtiles_row "$4";
  }

Installation

Prerequisites

You need to have a sqlite3-dev package installed. On Ubuntu or Debian you can install it using:

apt-get install libsqlite3-dev

Limitations

At the moment this expects that the tile content fetched from the mbtiles file is gzip compressed.

There may be some security issues around the regex matching ($1/$2/$3/$4), but 1) casting tile coordinates to shorts before fetching from the mbtiles should reduce some of these concerns, 2) you should probably not have sensitive data mixed in with your tilesets (ie serve tiles from a dedicated tile directory and set your document root to be the base of this directory).

Changes

08/2020: Various cleanups: restricted the $2/$3/$4 references to be numeric and implemented ZXY->TMS translation so that this module would work with libraries like Mapbox GL JS that request tiles in ZXY notation. Explicitly finalize the SQLite statement to close a memory leak. Changed missing tile HTTP response code to 204 No Content instead of 404 Not Found.

Much of the work on this was originally done by @pace (~2017).