Install martin with Homebrew, Nix

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• martin
• martin-cp
• mbtiles

Project history

The Martin repository was created in 2017 and its first public GitHub releases appeared in 2018. Early releases focused on PostGIS vector tile serving, function and table sources, TileJSON support, and a configuration-file workflow; version 0.2.0 added a command-line interface, making it more natural to package as a standalone server binary.

Martin later became part of the MapLibre ecosystem, with official documentation under MapLibre and a README that describes it as a lightweight tile server and toolset for PostGIS, PMTiles, MBTiles, styles, sprites, and glyphs. The project has continued active release work through the 1.x line, with GitHub showing 117 releases and a latest 1.11.0 release in June 2026.

Adoption history

Martin's adoption is visible in its role as an installable CLI/server package rather than only a library. The supplied package metadata lists it in Homebrew and Nix, and the repository has several thousand GitHub stars and hundreds of forks, which is substantial for a specialized geospatial infrastructure tool.

Its MapLibre documentation and packaging make it attractive to teams building self-hosted vector-tile services, especially when they want one binary that can serve from live PostGIS data, static MBTiles or PMTiles archives, and generated supporting assets.

How it is used

Typical usage is to start `martin` as a tile server, pointing it at data sources directly or through a YAML config file passed with `--config`. The config file can include database connection strings and environment-variable expansion, and Martin can generate a starting config with `--save-config`.

The bundled tools broaden the package beyond a daemon: `martin-cp` generates tiles in bulk into MBTiles, while `mbtiles` examines, copies, validates, compares, and diffs MBTiles files. That makes the formula useful both in long-running tile services and in offline tile-production jobs.

Why package nerds care

Martin matters to package users because it compresses a lot of geospatial deployment friction into a single Rust binary: database-backed vector tiles, archive-backed tile serving, and MBTiles maintenance can all be installed with a normal package manager.

For Homebrew and Nix users, it is a good example of modern GIS infrastructure moving from heavyweight web stacks toward small, reproducible CLI/server artifacts.

Timeline

• 2017: GitHub repository created.
• 2018: First public release series, including v0.1.0 and v0.2.0.
• 2018: v0.2.0 adds a command-line interface.
• 2026: GitHub lists Martin v1.11.0 as the latest release in June 2026.

Related projects

• Martin is closely related to MapLibre, PostGIS, PMTiles, MBTiles, and Mapbox Vector Tile tooling.
• It overlaps with tile servers and map pipelines that need to publish vector tiles from live databases or portable tile archives.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/maplibre/martin
• https://github.com/maplibre/martin
• https://github.com/maplibre/martin/releases?page=12
• https://maplibre.org/martin/config-file.html
• source_facts.package-manager-url