Vector tiles and snapshots

There are two ways to get vector tiles out of Sync Server.

	Live tiles	Snapshots
Freshness	Follows the cache	Frozen at build time
Built	On demand, per tile	Once, ahead of time
Cost per request	Tile generation (cached)	A read from an `.mbtiles` file
Cacheable at the edge	Partly	Fully — immutable, 1-year `max-age`
Good for	Data that changes and must look current	Big, stable basemap-ish layers under real traffic

Live tiles

/api/v0/rest/services/{baseId}/{tableName}/VectorTileServer/tiles.json     → TileJSON
/api/v0/rest/services/{baseId}/{tableName}/VectorTileServer/{z}/{x}/{y}.pbf

(.../VectorTileServer/{layer}/{z}/{x}/{y}.pbf also works, for Esri clients that expect a layer segment.)

Same authentication as any other read. Two paths run underneath, chosen automatically:

PostGIS bases serve tiles natively with ST_AsMVT, per tile, reading only the geometry that intersects the requested tile through the spatial index. No whole-table fetch.
Everything else builds tiles from the cached GeoJSON and caches the result. The tile cache is cleared whenever the table re-syncs.

A PostGIS table can be addressed by its bare name when that’s unambiguous across schemas, or as schema.table when it isn’t.

Snapshots

A snapshot is an immutable .mbtiles tileset built from a table and hosted by the server. You create one by asking for the mbtiles export format and giving it a slug.

curl -X POST '…/rest/services/{baseId}/FeatureServer/export' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -H 'Authorization: Bearer …' \
  -d '{
    "formats": "mbtiles",
    "mbtiles": {
      "name": "Country boundaries",
      "attribution": "© International Mapping",
      "minzoom": 0, "maxzoom": 10,
      "layers": [
        { "tableName": "Countries", "layer": "countries", "fields": ["UID", "NAME"] }
      ]
    },
    "snapshot": { "slug": "boundaries-2026q3", "public": false }
  }'

Once the job succeeds the tileset is served at:

GET /api/v0/tiles/{baseId}/{slug}/tiles.json        → TileJSON 3.0.0
GET /api/v0/tiles/{baseId}/{slug}/{z}/{x}/{y}.pbf   → a gzipped MVT tile

A public: true snapshot needs no credentials — point MapLibre straight at the tiles.json. Otherwise the caller authenticates for the owning base as usual.

Options

Key	Meaning
`name`, `description`, `attribution`	Tileset metadata
`minzoom` / `maxzoom`	Defaults `0` / `12`; `maxzoom` is overridable per layer
`layers[].tableName` or `layers[].layerId`	Which table becomes this MVT layer
`layers[].layer`	The MVT layer id — `[A-Za-z0-9_-]`, so it’s style-safe
`layers[].fields`	Keep-list of properties. Omit to keep everything
`layers[].geometry`	Derive geometry from named fields for a table whose config has none
`projection`	Omit for Web Mercator; see below

mbtiles does not accept the where / bbox / outSR / outFields export filters — it has its own per-layer fields and projection instead.

Projections

Web Mercator (EPSG:3857) is the default and is built with tippecanoe, which drops features by density as you zoom out. That’s what MapLibre and Mapbox GL can read.

Any other EPSG is built with GDAL’s MVT writer against a custom tiling scheme, which needs an explicit tileOrigin (upper-left, in CRS units) and tileDim0 (the size of the single zoom-0 tile). Those tilesets are for OpenLayers/ArcGIS-style clients with custom tile grids — MapLibre cannot read them.

Geometry from fields

A cached table may have no geometry because its config never named coordinate fields. Rather than editing the table and forcing a re-sync, give the snapshot its own mapping:

{ "geometry": { "latitudeField": "Lat", "longitudeField": "Lon", "geometryType": "Point" } }

Either a geometryField or both latitudeField and longitudeField. To see what a base has to work with:

GET /api/v0/bases/{baseId}/geometry-sources

Managing snapshots

GET    /api/v0/bases/{baseId}/snapshots                → list
PATCH  /api/v0/bases/{baseId}/snapshots/{slug}         → toggle public, edit name/attribution
DELETE /api/v0/bases/{baseId}/snapshots/{slug}         → remove the row and the file
GET    /api/v0/bases/{baseId}/snapshots/{slug}/download → stream the .mbtiles

Reads need access to the base; writes need write access.