question on "updating" tiles about mapbox-tile-copy

[mapsam]

Hi @jliebrand - thanks for the question! Knowing where your tiles are, and if they are updated, is outside the scope of this library (and the vector tile specification, which this adheres to). That said, you're on the right track with moving everything to a new s3 prefix (not saying this is the only way). I'd suggest having some sort of intermediate service in the API request that knows where your tilest lives on s3. The HTTP request remains the same but your API internals GET from an updated s3 prefix.

So for example (this has a lot of assumptions):

Let's say you have a tileset called neat-tileset. The first time you copy tiles to s3 you run the following command you could add a customized prefix to the s3 location, like v1:

mapbox-tile-copy neat-data.geojson s3://bucket/neat-tileset/v1/{z}/{x}/{y}

So when you request a tile through your API with the following URL

https://api.example.com/neat-tileset/0/0/0.mvt

Your API would see that request and have some sort of knowledge of where on S3 the neat-tileset tiles live. Let's say it's a TILESET_PREFIX variable set to v1. You're able to get the tile from that s3 bucket/prefix and return it.

Then you make a change to the source data and update neat-tileset. You may go to v2 and use the following command:

mapbox-tile-copy neat-data.geojson s3://bucket/neat-tileset/v2/{z}/{x}/{y}

At this point, the last big change you'll have to do is update your TILESET_PREFIX to be set to v2 so you're grabbing tiles from the new location.

Drawbacks?

Certainly. Depending on the API that is built and service you are using you'll want to figure out how to set expire tags and content headers so any sort of cache will notice this being a new request and not an old v1 request. Storage costs can become a factor if you do this at scale, and determining where TILESET_PREFIX lives and how it is updated can be challenging. But I'll leave those decisions to you :)

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Going to close this since as I mentioned before, the feature is out of scope of this library.