Deploy vectortiles to gh-pages

Deploy Vector Tile to gh-pages (work on vt)

Once your stylefiles' design and mbtiles are completed, now you are ready to deploy your vector tiles to gh-pages. postgis2vectortiles will assist you to create and deploy vector tiles.

There are two cases for deploying.

i. [narwassco/vt-map approach] A case of Narok Water, Kenya

If your coverage area is small, you can use the approach of Narok Water to deploy. Please have a look following repository.

• narwassco/vt-map This module will use the following submodules to create Mapbox Vector Tile for deployment to gh-pages.
  • watergis/postgis2mbtiles: It creates mbtiles from PostGIS.
  • watergis/mbtiles2pbf: It converts from mbtiles to pbf(mvt) tiles.

This module uses mapbox/tippecanoe for producing mbtiles. However, Narok water’s GIS computer is Windows 10 Pro, so it is not easy to run tippecanoe, I developed Docker to create Mapbox Vector Tile.

ii. [WASAC/vt approach] A case of WASAC, Rwanda (Recommended)

If your coverage area is huge, I am afraid it is not easy to deploy thousands of vector tiles to Github pages. So you can use WASAC approach to deploy mbtiles first, then use Github Actions to extract vector tiles from your mbtiles. You can see the following repository for your reference.

• WASAC/vt This module will use the following submodules to create Mapbox Vector Tile for deployment to gh-pages.
  • watergis/postgis2mbtiles: It creates mbtiles from PostGIS. postgis2mbtiles module will run on your local computer.
  • watergis/mbtiles2pbf: It converts from mbtiles to pbf(mvt) tiles. mbtiles2pbf will run on Github Actions.

The below is a workflow file of Narok Water to automate deploy pbf files from mbtiles by Github Actions.

name: Node.js CI

on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]

jobs:
  build:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Use Node.js
      uses: actions/setup-node@v1
      with:
        node-version: 12.x
    - run: npm ci
      env:
        NODE_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}
    - run: npm run extract
    - name: configure git and deploy
      env:
        NODE_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}
      run: |
        git config --global user.name "narwassco+githubci"
        git config --global user.email "narwassco+githubci@users.noreply.github.com"
        git remote set-url origin https://x-access-token:${NODE_AUTH_TOKEN}@github.com/narwassco/vt.git
        npm run deploy        

• Narok Water also started using [WASAC/vt approach] instead [narwassco/vt-map approach].

  • narwassco/vt

• Nakuru Water also started using [WASAC/vt approach].

  • nakuruwater/vt

In case data size exceeds more than capacity of Github Pages

Github Pages has limitation of usage maximum 1GB storage. If your data exceeds that limit, it is not possible to deploy to gh-pages.

However, you may have another option to use Netlify.

In Rwanda, we wanted to include parcels data as base map. Parcels in the whole Rwanda is originally 8GB in shapefile. After converting to pbf vector tiles, total size of tiles became 1.2GB. But we successfully managed to deploy parcels by usign Netlify.

You can have a look the below repository how we deployed huge vector tiles to Netlify.

• WASAC/vt-parcels-2020: Letest parcels as of 21 July 2020
• WASAC/vt-parcels: Old parcels vector tiles before 2019(we are not sure exact surveyed date)

Because parcels data is huge, we could not extract GeoJSON from PostGIS and to use tippecanoe. Thus in this case, we directly extract pbf tiles from PostGIS by using watergis/mvt-generator module. It is quite different approach from what vt repository do.