Install tippecanoe with Homebrew, apt, MacPorts, Nix

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• tile-join
• tippecanoe
• tippecanoe-decode
• tippecanoe-enumerate
• tippecanoe-json-tool
• tippecanoe-overzoom

Project history

Tippecanoe originated at Mapbox in the mid-2010s. The original Mapbox GitHub repository was created in September 2014, and the current Felt README states that version 2.0.0 is equivalent to Mapbox Tippecanoe 1.36.0, thanking Mapbox for years of early support.

Felt became Tippecanoe's new home in 2022. Felt's official interview with Erica Fischer says she originally authored Tippecanoe at Mapbox and joined Felt as the company revived development at felt/tippecanoe. The same post explains that Tippecanoe grew out of Fischer's data-visualization work with very large geodata sets and the need to thin low-zoom features based on spatial relationships rather than hand-authored importance tags.

Under Felt, Tippecanoe continued as an open-source tiling engine and a core component of Felt's own mapping stack. Felt's open-source page describes Tippecanoe as the best way over the past decade to make scale-independent views of data, and the project README says it is developed and actively maintained by Erica Fischer at Felt.

Adoption history

Tippecanoe's adoption is visible in both official project docs and package metadata. The README names Homebrew as the easiest installation method on macOS and documents source builds on Ubuntu. The input metadata also lists Homebrew, Debian, MacPorts, Nix, and Ubuntu packages.

Its usage spread because it solves a common web-map packaging problem: producing fast vector tiles while preserving the density and texture of large datasets. Official examples cover TIGER roads, Natural Earth data, building footprints, bus GPS traces, world cities, census tracts, layer merging, filtering, and joining tilesets. That breadth made it a go-to CLI for people building custom map tiles without a hosted tiling service.

How it is used

The core command is tippecanoe -o file.mbtiles with options and one or more input files. If no file is specified, it reads GeoJSON from standard input, which makes it natural in Unix pipelines.

Package users commonly use -zg to choose a maximum zoom level automatically, --drop-densest-as-needed or --coalesce-densest-as-needed to control tile size at low zooms, and tile-join to merge, filter, or update MBTiles outputs. The companion executables tippecanoe-decode, tippecanoe-enumerate, tippecanoe-json-tool, tippecanoe-overzoom, and tile-join reinforce its role as a toolkit rather than a single-purpose converter.

Why package nerds care

Tippecanoe is one of the rare geospatial tools that package nerds recognize by command name. It is important because it connects Unix-style data pipelines, open vector-tile formats, MBTiles files, and modern web-map rendering. Installing it from a package manager often replaces a hosted tiling workflow for local experiments, CI jobs, and reproducible map-data builds.

Timeline

• 2014-09-26: The original mapbox/tippecanoe GitHub repository was created.
• 2020-08-26: Mapbox Tippecanoe 1.36.0 was released.
• 2022-08-15: The felt/tippecanoe GitHub repository was created.
• 2022-09-13: Felt announced Erica Fischer's work on Tippecanoe at Felt and the revival of development at felt/tippecanoe.
• 2025-07-24: Felt Tippecanoe 2.79.0 was published according to GitHub release metadata.

Related projects

• The Mapbox Vector Tile specification is the output ecosystem Tippecanoe targets.
• tile-join is distributed with Tippecanoe and is central to merging and transforming tilesets.
• MapLibre GL JS, PMTiles, and Protomaps are adjacent open web-mapping projects referenced by Felt around its mapping stack.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/felt/tippecanoe
• https://api.github.com/repos/mapbox/tippecanoe
• https://felt.com/blog/erica-fischer-tippecanoe-at-felt
• https://felt.com/open-source
• https://github.com/felt/tippecanoe#readme
• source_facts.package-manager