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Read Mapbox Vector Tiles in R

The readMVT package supports reading vector data (points, lines, polygons) served as Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT) by a GeoServer. It is designed to work with Leaflet under Shiny, but should work fine in simpler situations. Vector data are returned as sf objects, so it’s possible to process vector data in R and return attributes as popups within Leaflet.

readMVT includes functions to query data sources and capabilities on a GeoServer, to obtain metadata on specific featuress, to translate latitude-longitude to MVT tile rows and columns, to read a tile, and to read all tiles in the current viewport.

Version 1.1.0 update (8-9 June 2026):

  • The previous version used WMTS REST endpoints, which no longer work in recent versions of GeoServer
  • This version uses the TMS endpoint instead; tested working on GeoServer 2.28.4
  • The gs-vectortiles extension must be installed separately (and version must match GeoServer exactly)

Installation

You can install the development version of readMVT from GitHub with:

if(!require('remotes'))
  install.packages('remotes') 
remotes::install_github('bwcompton/readMVT')

Example

For a detailed example, see vignette('shiny-example').