Allow for static map prerendering from versatiles-server

[marcopixel]

Similar case to https://www.mapbox.com/static-maps, it would be really nice to use static maps as a placeholder while the frontend and tiles are still loading it.

Didn't see it at any other projects and might be really useful too ^^
Love the project and idea behind it ❤️

[MichaelKreil]

There is a server-side renderer using Maplibre Native. Unfortunately it requires a GPU.
I did some promising experiments with rendering maps using JavaScript only. It can draw styled vector data (no sprites or glyphs) as SVG or in a canvas. But it's still at a very early stage.

[yetzt]

maplibre native does not require a gpu, but it's fiddly to set up.

[marcopixel]

Thanks for the info - seems like the experiment might be the way to go for me 👍

If it's okay for you i would like to keep this discussion open because it might be nice to have this feature built-in in the server implementations ^^

[MichaelKreil]

There is also a Rust prototype for MapLibre Native. So there might be a package we can integrate into VersaTiles in the near future.

[yetzt]

@marcopixel you can compile maplibre-native manually (which can be painful if you don't use the exact os they are supporting) and use the render binary or node bindings to do pretty much what you need. on linux you need to have a virtual framebuffer running (with xvfb).

/usr/bin/Xvfb :99 -screen 0 1024x1024x24 &
DISPLAY=:99 EGL_PLATFORM=x11 LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu" /path/to/maplibre-native/build/bin/mbgl-render --help