freestiler

freestiler is a robust tool designed for creating vector tilesets directly within R and Python programming environments. It allows users to convert various geospatial data inputs, such as sf objects, files on disk, or results from DuckDB SQL queries, into a single .pmtiles file. This output format is highly efficient and can be served from any web server, making it ideal for web mapping applications.

The core tiling engine is developed in Rust, which ensures high performance and reliability. This engine runs in-process, eliminating the need for additional installations or complex server configurations. Users can quickly install freestiler via R-universe or PyPI, integrating it seamlessly into their existing data workflows for tasks like tiling large datasets, including US block groups or millions of job points, with optimized performance.

Beyond tile generation, freestiler also offers functionalities for viewing generated tilesets. It includes a built-in local server for quick visualization and integration with web mapping libraries like mapboxgl in R. The tool's capability to process DuckDB queries allows for advanced filtering, joining, and transformation of data before tiling, supporting streaming pipelines for very large point datasets to avoid memory overload.