// the find
systemed/tilemaker
Make OpenStreetMap vector tiles without the stack
tilemaker converts OpenStreetMap PBF extracts into Mapbox Vector Tiles with no database required — just one C++ binary. It's for developers or cartographers who want to self-host map tiles without running a PostGIS + osm2pgsql + tegola stack. The Lua scripting layer for tag processing is genuinely flexible.
The stack-free premise actually holds: no Postgres, no tile server middleware, just an .osm.pbf in and .pmtiles out. The Lua configuration model is a good call — OSM tag processing is inherently messy conditional logic, and Lua handles it without forcing users to recompile. PMTiles output is a smart default given Protomaps' growing ecosystem. Memory-vs-SSD tradeoff is exposed cleanly via --store, so processing a full planet isn't blocked behind a beefy RAM budget.
No live update path is a genuine constraint, not just a documented limitation — if you need OSM data fresher than your last full import, you're rebuilding from scratch or writing your own diff pipeline. The C++ build with five non-trivial dependencies (Boost, Lua, shapelib, sqlite3, rapidjson) will cause pain on anything other than Debian/Ubuntu; the Docker image papers over this but hides it. The bundled demo server (Simple-Web-Server) is clearly not production-grade and there's no guidance on what a real serving setup looks like. Lua as a configuration language is also a footgun for anyone who doesn't know it — the documentation assumes familiarity that most GIS users won't have.