PMTiles is a cloud-native geospatial data format and a set of tools for creating cloud-optimized map tile archives. It organizes map tile pyramids into a single-file archive, allowing map data to be stored and retrieved from remote buckets without a dedicated backend database.
The project provides a map tile format converter to transform various data sources into this unified archive and a map tile server proxy that serves these archives to display systems using standard protocols. It enables the use of HTTP byte-range requests and metadata-driven indexing to retrieve specific tiles without downloading the entire file.
The system covers map data archiving, static map tile distribution, and offline map data storage. It includes command-line tools for uploading archives to cloud storage buckets.