MapView

Render beautiful, production-ready maps directly from your Ruby backend. No external APIs. No dependencies. Just pure speed and control.

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Zero external dependencies

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Lightning-fast rendering

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Production-ready & battle-tested

Try the Live Demo → Read Docs

In 2025, at the RubyWorld Conference, engineers from Tokyo Gas presented a real problem:

👉 generate maps in real time 👉 at high throughput 👉 with strict performance constraints

ImageMagick-based solutions couldn’t keep up.

The gap in Ruby

Today in Ruby:

RMagick / ruby-vips → rely on external processes
native bindings → outdated or unmaintained

There isn’t a modern, simple, truly native option.

The approach

I built ruby-libgd + libgd-gis with a straightforward goal:

in-memory rendering
no external processes
full control from Ruby

			
require "gd/gis"
map = GD::GIS::Map.new(
  bbox: [139.68, 35.63, 139.82, 35.75],
  zoom: 13
)
map.add_geojson("data.geojson")
map.render
map.save("map.png")

		

What it enables

generate maps from GeoJSON
draw routes, points, and polygons
apply custom styles
produce production-ready images

🎥 Full talk (in Spanish)

I presented this in a virtual talk at Ruby SUR:

👉

In progress

animated maps
PostGIS integration
custom tile servers

👉 Check the project

GitHub: https://github.com/ggerman/ruby-libgd

GitHub: https://github.com/ggerman/libgd-gis

Generating thousands of maps per minute in Ruby