mapbox/vector-tile-spec resource

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1004 stars · 213 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

The Mapbox Vector Tile Specification, a formal standard for encoding tiled vector geographic data as Protocol Buffers (.mvt files). It defines geometry and attribute encoding rules, versioning, and a reference .proto file for implementers.

Use cases

• implement a vector tile encoder or decoder
• understand how mapbox vector tiles store geometry and attributes
• find the .proto file for mvt format
• learn the mvt file format specification
• build a gis tool that reads or writes vector tiles
• check versioning rules for vector tile layers

When to choose

• you are building software that encodes or decodes Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT)
• you need the authoritative reference for the .mvt protobuf format
• you want to verify interoperability of your tiling implementation

When to avoid

• you need a working library rather than a specification - use an implementation like awesome-vector-tiles lists
• you are working with OpenStreetMap PBF files, which are unrelated despite sharing the protobuf format
• you need raster tiles or a map rendering engine

Facets

learning-resource · maturity stable

serialization geospatial documentation web-development documentation cross-platform vector-tiles mapbox protobuf mvt specification gis geospatial maps

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="mapbox/vector-tile-spec")