tilepack

Pack raster tile folders (TMS or XYZ) into single-file archives (MBTiles / PMTiles) and serve them as TMS and WMTS endpoints over HTTP.

Why

Raster tile folders contain thousands of small PNG files in deeply nested z/x/y directories. This makes them slow to copy, hard to manage, and fragile to transfer. Tilepack solves this by packing tiles into a single archive file while still exposing standard TMS and WMTS HTTP endpoints that clients like QGIS and CesiumForUnreal can consume directly.

Installation

Requires Python 3.11+.

pip install tilepack

For development:

git clone https://github.com/ashnair1/tilepack.git
cd tilepack
uv sync --group dev

Quick Start

# Verify a tile folder
tilepack verify ./path/to/tiles

# Convert to archive
tilepack convert ./path/to/tiles output.mbtiles

# Serve as TMS + WMTS endpoint
tilepack serve output.mbtiles --port 8000

MBTiles vs PMTiles

	MBTiles	PMTiles
Format	SQLite database	Cloud-optimised archive (Hilbert-curve index)
File count	1	1
Needs a tile server	Yes	No (supports HTTP range requests)
Best for	Local / on-prem serving	Cloud storage (S3, Azure Blob, GCS)

Use MBTiles for local or on-prem serving (e.g. feeding CesiumForUnreal on the same machine or network).

Use PMTiles if you plan to host tiles in cloud storage. PMTiles can be served directly from a bucket via HTTP range requests with no tile server needed.

Either format works identically when served through tilepack serve.