Mapbox Tilesets

Contact Kyle (ktbarnes@princeton.edu) with any questions!

How to upload data to mapbox tilesets

note

This is how we uploaded census blocks + state legislature borders. Counties are through Mapbox's existing election data tileset. Also note that for some reason Nebraska's files don't show on Mapbox? This is an ongoing mystery.

  1. Find your data ! Census blocks and a lot of other shapefiles are available from the census website at https://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/shapefiles/index.php
  2. Install tippecanoe (https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe)
# on MacOS
brew install tippecanoe
# on Ubuntu
git clone https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe.git
cd tippecanoe
make -j
make install
  1. Get the file, unzip, convert to geojson (might have to install GDAL for ogr2ogr, brew install gdal)
curl -L -O {URL}/{file-name}.zip
unzip {file-name}.zip
ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON {file-name}.geojson {file-name}.shp
  1. Convert to mbtiles (much smaller!) -ai & -aN create unique ids for use in filter on entry page: tippecanoe -o {file-name}.mbtiles -ai -aN -ab {file-name}.geojson
  2. Install mapbox cli: pip install mapboxcli
  3. Export mapbox token (ask Kyle if you need it, different from mapbox key): export MAPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN={TOKEN}
  4. upload the file: mapbox upload mapbox_user_name.{name} {file-name}.geojson it's also possible to do this through mapbox studio with an easy to use GUI
  5. now you can edit the javascript
map.addSource("source-name", {
type: "vector",
url: "mapbox://mapbox_user_name.{name}"
});

Make sure when you do map.addLayer(), you add "source": "{source-name}" and "source-layer": "{file-name}"! you are done

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