// the find
walkerke/pmtiles
An R package for inspecting, viewing, and interacting with PMTiles
An R wrapper around the go-pmtiles CLI that bundles pre-compiled binaries for all major platforms. It covers the full PMTiles workflow — inspect, convert, extract, serve, and visualize — without requiring R users to touch a terminal. Aimed at geospatial R users (tidycensus/sf crowd) who want to work with tiled data without leaving their environment.
Shipping platform binaries inside the package is a genuinely good call — zero PATH setup, works on Windows, the install story is 'run install.packages and you're done'. The dual serve approach (raw PMTiles protocol via pm_serve vs Z/X/Y endpoints via pm_serve_zxy) is honest about the tradeoff between simplicity and compatibility. pm_create() exposes a large slice of tippecanoe's flag surface through R arguments rather than hiding them, so power users aren't stuck with opinionated defaults. Remote URL support across most functions means you can inspect or extract from a cloud-hosted archive without downloading it.
The whole thing is a subprocess wrapper — every function shells out to the bundled binary, so error handling is whatever the CLI prints to stderr, not structured R conditions you can catch cleanly. pm_create() requires tippecanoe installed separately and silently doesn't work on Windows, which contradicts the 'no additional dependencies' claim in the README. 83 stars and 1 fork after a year suggests thin adoption, meaning bugs you hit are probably yours alone to debug. No tests visible in the tree — for a package that wraps a binary and does file I/O, the absence of even basic integration tests is a risk if the bundled binary version ever changes behavior.