Python port of JS vt-pbf to Encode Mapbox vector tiles to binary protobufs in python. Right now available only version 2 of mapbox vector tiles spec

vt2pbf is available on PyPi.

Install using pip.

pip install vt2pbf

Import vt2pbf

from vt2pbf import vt2pbf

Firstly you need to make a vector tile. You can do it by your own or use some libraries to convert, for example geojson into vector tiles using python port of geojson-vt library - geojson2vt

After you can easily encode your vector tile into pbf:

# build an initial index of tiles
tile_index = geojson2vt(geojson, {})

# request a particular tile
vector_tile = tile_index.get_tile(z, x, y)

# encode vector tile into pbf
pbf = vt2pbf(vector_tile)
print(pbf) # b'\x1a\xfb\x01\n\x0cgeojsonLayer\...'

vt2pbf takes two additional arguments:

• layer_name is a name of encoded layer, default='geojsonLayer',
• extend is definition of the extent of the tile, default=4096

You also can encode any custom information in pbf by Mapbox vector tiles spec

from vt2pbf import Tile


tile = Tile(extend=extend)
tile.add_layer(layer_name, features=features)  # features in vector_tile format (close to vector_tile['features'])
tile.add_layer(other_layer_name, features=features)
pbf_string = tile.serialize_to_bytestring()
print(pbf_string) # b'\x1a\xfb\x01\n\x0cgeojsonLayer\...'

In addition you can parse encoded data from bytestring using:

from vt2pbf import parse_from_string

pbf_string = b'\x1a\xfb\x01\n\x0cgeojsonLayer\...'
tile = parse_from_string(pbf_string)
print(tile.tile_pbf)
# layers {
#   name: "geojsonLayer"
#   features {
#     tags: 0
#     ...

Right now you cannot add some additional layers or info to parsed tile, but it will be available in future

All the credit of tile encoding belongs to the collaborators of JS vt-pbf.