How to get a shapefile into TileMill 2

tilemill2.md

How to get a shapefile into TileMill 2

Getting the shapefile onto your computer

You probably already have a shapefile. If not, I downloaded one from Natural Earth:

$ curl -L -O http://www.naturalearthdata.com/http//www.naturalearthdata.com/download/10m/cultural/ne_10m_admin_0_countries.zip

and unzipped it:

$ mkdir countries
$ cd countries/
$ unzip ../ne_10m_admin_0_countries.zip 

Creating a TileMill 2 source from the shapefile

• Go into TileMill 2. Click the Untitled gear above the map

• Click Sources at the top right

• Click New Source at the left

• Click +Layers at the top right

• Give your layer a name, select that it is a Shapefile, and hit New Layer

• Fill in a name and projection for the shapefile

• Then click the file picker to select the file to get the data from

• Find your file, click on it, and hit Select

• Now the description, file path, and projection are all filled in.

• Click "Done"

• Now you need to save the source as a .tm2 file. Click "Save as"

• And give it a name and hit Save

• Now you can finally see the preview of the data!

• You need to give it a description so you can find it again. Go back to the Untitled gear again

• And fill in a name, description, and attribution.

• And hit Save

Styling it

• Now your source has a name next to the gear. Hit that.

• And switch from Sources to Styles

• And say "New Style"

• The new style has Mapbox Streets by default. To change that, click the three-lines thing:

• And click the +Data button

• Now you can click the source you created from the list on the right

• It shows up in the data list on the left

• Fill in a minimal style for it in the style text box on the right

• And click "Save as" to save that styling

• Give it a name and hit Save

• And now you can see your styled shapefile

Exporting the source to vector tiles

• Click the gear to get back to the sources/styles

• Click Sources

• Click the source you made earlier

• Click the gear again

• Click Export in the bottom right

• Wait for it to do the export

• When it's done, click Vector MBTiles to download the tileset

Uploading the source tileset to Mapbox

• Go to http://mapbox.com/data
• Click Upload MBTiles

• Choose the file you just downloaded, and hit "Upload file"

• Wait for it to upload and process

• When it's done (and you may need to reload to find out that it's done) click the line item for it

• And note the map ID

Adding the network vector tileset as a source

• Go back to TileMill 2 and click the gear again to get back to the sources/styles

• Click Sources

• Click MapBox

• Enter the ID of your map and hit Add Source

• Hit Save

Using the network vector tileset with your style

• Click the gear again to get back to the sources/styles

• Click Styles

• Click the style you made earlier

• Click the three-lines thing to see the data layers

• Click +Data to change the data source

• Click the vector source you just created. It looks just like the local source except it's not grayed out, but you can also distinguish it by the "source-mapbox" in the URL

• Click X to get out of the source picker

• Your map looks just the same, but you can see the "Remote" indicator showing that it is coming from tiles over the network.