MapLibre Source Wiring

You have a tile URL or a data file and a style, and the map is blank, drawing at the wrong scale, or drawing in the wrong order. This skill covers connecting a source to a style correctly, and the failure modes that look identical from the outside.

When to Use This Skill

The source is already configured and the map is wrong in a way that produces no error. These are symptoms as you would observe them, before you know the cause:

• The map is blank, or a layer you added draws nothing, and the console is clean
• A custom style renders nothing against a tile source that works with the provider's own style
• The basemap is blurry, or sits at a different scale than everything drawn on top of it
• Data you added has covered the street names
• Icons are missing while the rest of the map draws fine
• Hover or click highlighting does nothing at all, and no error is raised
• You have a tile endpoint and are unsure which source type it needs, or whether to point url at its TileJSON instead of hand-writing tiles

Not this skill. Text in the wrong font, missing scripts, or self-hosting glyph PBFs — maplibre-fonts-glyphs. Deciding the colors, type, and drawing order of a style you are designing — maplibre-cartography. Deciding whether a dataset belongs in GeoJSON or vector tiles at all — maplibre-tile-sources.

Referencing tiles: url vs tiles

Tiles are addressed by zoom (Z), column (X), and row (Y) — a universal scheme across raster and vector tile sources (see the OpenStreetMap wiki for more information). In a MapLibre source, you reference tiles either directly via a tiles URL template or via a url pointing to a TileJSON endpoint.

When a TileJSON endpoint is available, prefer url. MapLibre fetches the document and reads the tile URL template, zoom range, bounds, attribution, and (for vector tiles) the available source-layers automatically. Tile servers like Martin and tileserver-gl generate TileJSON endpoints for every tileset they serve, as do many hosted providers.

When no TileJSON endpoint exists — for example, a raw raster tile service that gives you a URL template directly — use the tiles array and specify any metadata (minzoom, maxzoom, attribution) in the source definition yourself.

url to a TileJSON endpoint:

{
  "type": "vector",
  "url": "https://example.com/tiles.json"
}

tiles array:

{
  "type": "vector",
  "tiles": ["https://example.com/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.pbf"],
  "minzoom": 0,
  "maxzoom": 14
}

{z}, {x} and {y} are tokens MapLibre replaces with each tile's zoom, column and row before it makes a request. A template pasted into a browser with the braces still in it asks for no real tile, so its status code says nothing about the server. To check the server by hand, request a real tile inside the source's zoom range, such as /0/0/0.pbf.

The cost of hand-wiring tiles is that MapLibre has no zoom range unless you supply one, and will assume maxzoom: 22 — requesting zoom levels the tileset doesn't contain, which come back empty. This is why url is the default advice wherever a TileJSON endpoint exists. (For PMTiles specifically the same rule applies and the consequence is sharper — see maplibre-pmtiles-patterns.)

Nothing renders: source-layer and the tile schema

The most common cause of a custom style rendering nothing against a working tile source is a source-layer mismatch.

A vector tile source contains named layers — transportation, water, landuse and so on — and every style layer that draws from it must name one exactly:

{
  "id": "roads",
  "type": "line",
  "source": "basemap",
  "source-layer": "transportation"
}

source-layer is required for vector sources and must match the tile schema exactly. A typo or a name from a different schema produces no error and no output — the layer simply draws nothing.

Find the real names in the TileJSON. For vector sources, the TileJSON vector_layers field lists each available source-layer, its attribute fields, and its zoom range. This is the authoritative reference when it is present — TileJSON 3.0 requires it for vector tilesets, but 2.x documents predate it and providers are inconsistent about supplying it. Its absence does not mean there is no schema: identify the schema by name (below) and work from its published layer list. If you use a provider's pre-built style URL, the schema is already matched for you; the mismatch only appears when you write your own layers.

Pre-defined tile schemas

When building a custom style you need to know the tile schema — the source-layer names and their properties. Common schemas:

• OpenMapTiles — the most widely adopted schema, based on OpenStreetMap data. Rich and detailed, with source-layers like transportation, water, landuse, poi. The largest ecosystem of community styles targets this schema.
• Shortbread — an open standard designed to be minimal and interoperable, not tied to any single vendor. Simpler structure than OpenMapTiles; a clean foundation if you're building styles from scratch.
• Protomaps — purpose-built for the Protomaps PMTiles basemap ecosystem. Flat, simple structure with source-layers like earth, water, roads, places; optimized for serverless delivery. Published layer list: docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/layers.

Each of these publishes its layer list as documentation (see References). None carries a machine-readable version marker, so checking a schema means re-reading the page; nothing can poll it for changes.

When generating tiles with Planetiler or tippecanoe, the output embeds TileJSON metadata in the MBTiles or PMTiles file. Tile servers like Martin read this metadata and expose it as a TileJSON endpoint automatically.

Layer order: drawing below labels

Layers are drawn bottom-to-top in the order they appear in the style. map.addLayer() with no second argument appends the layer above everything, including street names — which is why a data overlay added this way hides the basemap's labels. The fix is to pass the ID of the first symbol layer as addLayer's second argument, found programmatically rather than hardcoded (road-label and friends are schema-specific and break the moment you change basemaps). A raster layer added after vector layers obscures them for the same reason.

For the injection pattern in full, and the canonical layer order for a style built from scratch, see maplibre-cartography.

Missing labels and icons: glyphs and sprite

Two style-root properties supply the assets that symbol layers draw with:

• glyphs — URL template for font stacks: "glyphs": "https://example.com/fonts/{fontstack}/{range}.pbf"
• sprite — base URL for the sprite sheet and metadata, serving both .json and .png: "sprite": "https://example.com/sprites/basic"

Pre-built style URLs from hosted providers include their own. When building a custom style or self-hosting, you must supply them.

The two fail differently when absent, and the difference is what makes a symptom readable backwards to a cause. Since GL JS 5.11.0 an absent glyphs does not remove text: MapLibre renders it in a local system font instead, so the symptom is text in the wrong face, not missing text. Reach for glyphs when the labels are there but wrong, not when they are absent entirely. An absent sprite logs a console warning for each missing icon (Image "<id>" could not be loaded) and renders none; map.hasImage(id) returns false for each. A sprite URL that fails to load also logs an error.

For the fallback's mechanism and its limits (it is GL JS only; Native still needs served PBFs), font stacks, self-hosting versus generating, and script coverage, see maplibre-fonts-glyphs.

Raster sources: tileSize and naming traps

Two raster-specific pitfalls that wire without error but render wrong or against the wrong assumption:

tileSize defaults to 512; classic OSM tiles are 256. tile.openstreetmap.org and other classic slippy-map tile servers serve 256px tiles, but MapLibre's raster tileSize defaults to 512px. Omitting tileSize: 256 for a 256px source doesn't error — it renders at the wrong effective zoom level, with imagery and labels appearing a zoom level off, with no error or warning:

{
  "type": "raster",
  "tiles": ["https://tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png"],
  "tileSize": 256
}

A raster endpoint's name is not its type. An endpoint named "hillshade," "terrain," or similar is not necessarily a raster-dem source. raster-dem requires the tiles to encode elevation as pixel-packed RGB (Mapbox or Terrarium encoding) in PNG or WebP — TileJSON's encoding field, when present, names which. A tile format that can't hold that encoding (JPEG, for instance) with no encoding field is ordinary raster imagery whatever the endpoint is named — a "hillshade" endpoint is often a pre-rendered hillshade image, not raw elevation data for MapLibre to shade client-side. Check the tile format and any encoding field before treating a name as evidence of raster-dem.

Feature state: the source needs an id, and promoteId is usually how it gets one

setFeatureState and the feature-state expression key on a feature's id — a top-level member of the feature object, not a value inside properties. A source whose features have no id gives setFeatureState nothing to attach to, so it fails silently: no console error, the paint expression never fires, and getFeatureState returns empty.

Set promoteId to the property you already key on. It tells MapLibre to use that property as the feature id, and it is the right answer whenever the identifier lives in properties:

map.addSource('parcels', {
  type: 'geojson',
  data: parcels,
  promoteId: 'parcel_id'
});
map.setFeatureState({ source: 'parcels', id: 'APN-1234' }, { hover: true });

For a vector source, promoteId is either a property name applied across all source-layers, or an object of the form {<sourceLayer>: <propertyName>}.[9]

Do not reach for generateId or a hand-written id when a business key exists. Both look like fixes and both fail this case:

• generateId: true assigns ids by index in the features array, overwriting any existing values.[9] The ids are not stable across a setData that reorders, filters, or appends, so state silently attaches to the wrong feature after an update.
• Writing a top-level id works only for integers: without promoteId, a feature's id "must be an integer or a string that can be cast to an integer."[9] A key like APN-1234 is accepted and then never matches. With promoteId the value may be any primitive.

CORS

If your tiles, glyphs, or sprites are on a different origin, the server must send CORS headers (Access-Control-Allow-Origin). Otherwise the browser blocks the requests and the map is blank or missing labels.

Hosted providers handle CORS for you. For self-hosted servers or static storage, configure CORS on the server or CDN. Range-request sources (PMTiles) additionally need Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Range.

Diagnosing a blank map

Work down this list — the symptoms overlap heavily:

Related Skills

• maplibre-tile-sources — Choosing between GeoJSON and tiles for a dataset.
• maplibre-pmtiles-patterns — Registering the pmtiles:// protocol and PMTiles-specific source setup.
• maplibre-fonts-glyphs — Font stacks, glyph endpoints, and script coverage.
• maplibre-sprites-icons — The sprite URL forms, loading multiple sheets, self-hosting sprite assets, and route shields.
• maplibre-cartography — The layer-injection pattern in full, and canonical layer order for a custom style.

References

1. MapLibre Style Specification — maplibre.org/maplibre-style-spec/
2. TileJSON specification — specification repository on GitHub; version 3.0 (Aug 2021) made vector_layers required for vector tilesets
3. Slippy map tile naming (Z/X/Y scheme) — OpenStreetMap wiki
4. OpenMapTiles schema — openmaptiles.org/schema/
5. Shortbread tile schema — shortbread-tiles.org
6. Protomaps basemap layers — docs.protomaps.com/basemaps/layers
7. Martin tile server (TileJSON endpoints) — maplibre.org/martin/
8. MapLibre GL JS docs — maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/
9. promoteId, generateId, and feature-state — Style Specification: sources and expressions

This skill is a snapshot. Where a primary source contradicts it — the References above, MapLibre's current documentation, or what MapLibre does when you run it — that source wins. Follow it, then report the disagreement, citing the source and your MapLibre version: editing your installed copy helps no one else and is overwritten on the next update.