1. Directory of shape files (downloaded from dropbox)
2. Generate GeoJSON (using ogr2ogr cli)
3. Convert to line-delimited GeoJSON (using jq cli)
4. Convert to MBTiles (using tippecanoe cli)
5. Server reads those MBTiles (when running docker from within the MBT dir)

The tilebuilder Dockerfile takes a generic debian linux image and adds all the dependencies needed to run the steps above. Via the docker-compose.yml, it will have access to the local script and shapefiles directories and will output any generated mbtiles files to the shared mbtiles volume, which the tileserver will also have access to.

This image should be built automatically when running docker-compose up, but there are a few ways to force it to build on its own if needed.

$ docker build -t terrastories/tilebuilder ./tilebuilder
$ docker-compose build tilebuilder
$ docker-compose up -d --build tilebuilder

When the docker container runs it finds and executes /script/convert.sh. This script will convert all .shp files in the /shapefiles to GeoJSON format using ogr2ogr and then combine the generated .json files into layers of a single mbtiles file.

The conversion script should provide the magic sauce that performs steps 2-4 from the overview above. For reference, it is roughly equivalent to running the following statements.

$ ogr2ogr -f "GeoJSON" path/to/output.geojson path/to/shapefile.shp
$ jq -rc '.features[]' out.geojson > line-delimited.geojson
$ tippecanoe -o file.mbtiles line-delimited.geojson