Tips & Tricks

Inspecting MVT contents

Curious about what's in an MVT tile?

proto decoder

Use the the proto decoder to inspect MVT tile contents (features and their properties in the proto buff encoded tile).

protoc --decode mapnik.vector.tile -I /path/to/dir/containing/proto /path/to/dir/containing/proto/vector_tile.proto < tile_to_decode.mvt

The output is mostly human readable and useful for answering questions like "is this layer empty", "does a feature with this name or ID exist in the tile?", or "i was expecting a Polygon, what's the geometry type of this feature?".

Convert MVT to GeoJSON

For geometry questions, such as "this feature is in the tile, but where is it?" or "is this feature degenerate / valid?", the tile-info.py script from https://github.com/mapbox/vector-tile-py will output the tile as GeoJSON.