MapLibre Open Maps

MapLibre is a set of open-source mapping libraries forked from Mapbox GL in 2020 when Mapbox transitioned their rendering engine to a proprietary license, maintained by the MapLibre Alliance under the BSD 3-Clause License. The project provides two main rendering libraries including MapLibre GL JS written in TypeScript for web browsers with GPU-accelerated vector tile rendering through WebGL, and MapLibre Native written in C-plus-plus for iOS, Android, Linux, macOS, Windows, and embedded systems with backends for OpenGL, Metal, and Vulkan. The GL JS library renders interactive maps from vector tiles and raster tiles with smooth zooming, panning, rotating, and pitching at sixty frames per second, supporting the Mapbox Style Specification for declarative map styling including layers, sources, expressions, sprites, and fonts. The rendering pipeline supports custom layers through WebGL directly, enabling integration with external rendering engines for overlaying 3D models, animated data, and particle effects on base maps. The expression language enables data-driven styling where feature properties dynamically control visual properties including color, size, width, and opacity. MapLibre Native provides platform-specific bindings for Swift on iOS, Kotlin and Java on Android, and C API for other platforms, with shared rendering logic across all targets. The Martin tile server written in Rust provides self-hosted vector tile generation from PostGIS, PMTiles, and GeoJSON sources.