Tiles API

The vector tiles behind every N-Ways map, for your own map styles: roads, buildings, water, land, places and points of interest across Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Togo, Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde and The Gambia.

On this page

How N-Ways serves tiles
Use them in a style
Layers
Fonts
Caching

How N-Ways serves tiles

N-Ways map data comes as vector tiles, two ways: one tile at a time (.mvt, for any map library), or as a PMTiles archive read a piece at a time with HTTP range requests (MapLibre with the pmtiles library’s protocol), which caches well on phones and at the edge.

Hosted styles	`https://nways.ng/maps/v1/styles/streets-light.json`, `streets-dark.json` (`?lang=fr` for French names; `?format=pmtiles` to read the archive)
One tile	`https://nways.ng/maps/v1/tiles/base/{z}/{x}/{y}.mvt` (every country in one tileset)
Archives	One per country, such as `https://tiles.nways.ng/maps/v1/tiles/nigeria.pmtiles` (the CDN, no key), or `https://nways.ng/maps/v1/tiles/nigeria.pmtiles` (keyed). Every country’s archives are listed in `countries.json`, in the same folder.
Fonts	`https://tiles.nways.ng/maps/v1/fonts/{fontstack}/{range}.pbf` (free, no key)
Other tilesets	`detail` (lanes, markings, every building, zoom 12 to 16) and `transit` (rail, stations, boats, roadworks, zoom 5 to 15), one tile at a time; as archives, `nigeria-detail.pmtiles` and `nigeria-transit.pmtiles`
Format	Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT) in a PMTiles v3 archive
Zooms	0 to 15 (drawn larger above 15)
Coverage	Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Togo, Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde and The Gambia; each country’s box and outline are in `countries.json`
Status	Live

A tile of base, detail or transit comes from the archive of the country it lies in, so one tile URL covers all fifteen countries; read an archive yourself and you get one country. With ?format=pmtiles, a hosted style has one source per country. A hosted style read is one map load: that’s where your key is checked. Hosted styles read the archives and fonts from the CDN tiles.nways.ng, a public copy where reads need no key and aren’t counted. On the API, each tile, or each archive session from a site, is one tiles call. Fonts are never charged. The earlier addresses (https://nways.ng/tiles/…, /fonts/…) keep working.

Use them in a style

JavaScript

import * as maplibregl from 'maplibre-gl'
import { Protocol } from 'pmtiles'

maplibregl.addProtocol('pmtiles', new Protocol().tile)

new maplibregl.Map({
  container: 'map',
  center: [3.3792, 6.5244],
  zoom: 12,
  style: {
    version: 8,
    glyphs: 'https://tiles.nways.ng/maps/v1/fonts/{fontstack}/{range}.pbf',
    sources: {
      nways: {
        type: 'vector',
        // One country's archive (countries.json lists them all).
        url: 'pmtiles://https://tiles.nways.ng/maps/v1/tiles/nigeria.pmtiles',
        attribution: '© <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors · N-Ways',
      },
    },
    layers: [
      { id: 'land', type: 'background', paint: { 'background-color': '#eef0e6' } },
      { id: 'water', type: 'fill', source: 'nways', 'source-layer': 'water', paint: { 'fill-color': '#9cc7e4' } },
      { id: 'roads', type: 'line', source: 'nways', 'source-layer': 'roads', paint: { 'line-color': '#ffffff', 'line-width': 1.5 } },
    ],
  },
})

The Maps SDK does all this for you, with a full style.

Layers

The tiles follow the Protomaps basemap layers. Every feature has a kind; named ones have name (the local name), and often name:en and name:fr.

Layer	What’s in it	Useful fields
`earth`	Land	`kind`
`water`	Sea, lagoons, rivers, lakes	`kind`, `name`
`landcover`	Forest, grass, farmland, scrub	`kind`
`landuse`	Parks, markets, hospitals, schools, residential areas	`kind`
`roads`	Roads and paths	`kind` (`highway`, `major_road`, `minor_road`, `path`, `other`), `kind_detail`, `name`, `ref`, `oneway`, `is_bridge`, `is_tunnel`
`buildings`	Building footprints	`height`, `min_height`, `addr_housenumber`
`boundaries`	Country and state borders	`kind`, `kind_detail`, `disputed`
`places`	Countries, states, cities, towns, neighbourhoods	`kind`, `name`, `population`, `capital`, `min_zoom`
`pois`	Points of interest	`kind`, `name`, `min_zoom`

Fonts

Map labels use Inter. The font stacks are Inter-Regular, Inter-Medium, Inter-SemiBold, Inter-Bold and Inter-Italic; use one at a time, like "text-font": ["Inter-Medium"].

Caching

Browsers and MapLibre cache tiles for you. Don’t download whole archives or crawl every tile to store them: for maps without a network, use offline packs. What you may store