Publishing your base map on your server with PHP

So far, we have successfully used the tools provided by Mapbox to style our maps. We have also seen how easy it is to publish a map to the Mapbox platform, especially if we use Mapbox Studio.

There are cases where we may need to host a map on our own server, and we will explore two different ways of doing this.

In the first case, we will use PHP. While this is not the best option for this task, PHP can be found installed on every server, and projects using PHP are easy to deploy.

How it works…

First of all, we will export our maps from TileMill. The format that we will export in will be .mbtiles, which is actually a SQLite file containing the data and the tiles.

Note

MBTiles is just a SQLite database that contains metadata information along with PNG images. Its purpose is to have a single file that contains everything needed to serve a map. In cases such as mobile applications, storing thousands of tiles and metadata information in the app...