loaders.gl

Framework-independent loaders and writers for visualization, 3D, geospatial, tabular, and scientific data.

Formats, encodings, and protocols by module (see each README for runtime and implementation limits):

Module	Formats, encodings, and protocols
@loaders.gl/arcgis	ArcGIS, FeatureServer, MapServer, ImageServer, VectorTileServer, SceneServer, PBF, JSON, GeoJSON.
@loaders.gl/archives	ZIP, TAR.
@loaders.gl/compression	DEFLATE, zlib, GZIP, Brotli, Snappy, LZ4, LZO, BZip2, XZ, LZMA, Zstandard, Zstd.
@loaders.gl/config	YAML, TOML.
@loaders.gl/core	Arrow, GeoArrow, GeoJSON, WKT, WKB.
@loaders.gl/crypto	CRC32, CRC32C, MD5, SHA-256.
@loaders.gl/draco	Draco.
@loaders.gl/geospatial	KML, KMZ, GPX, TCX, Shapefile, SHP, SHX, DBF, CPG, PRJ, FlatGeobuf, GeoPackage, WKT, WKT CRS, WKB, TWKB.
@loaders.gl/graphs	DOT, GraphML, GEXF.
@loaders.gl/images	PNG, JPEG, JPG, GIF, WebP, BMP, ICO, SVG, AVIF. Availability depends on the runtime and installed codecs.
@loaders.gl/ogc	WMS, WFS, WMTS, WCS, CSW, GML, OGC API, STAC, STAC API, XML, JSON, GeoJSON.
@loaders.gl/pointclouds	LAS, LAZ, PCD, PLY.
@loaders.gl/raster	GeoTIFF, TIFF, COG, OME-TIFF, LERC, LERC1, LERC2, quantized mesh, Mapbox Terrain-RGB, Terrarium, PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP.
@loaders.gl/scene	glTF, GLB, OBJ, MTL, OpenUSD, USD, USDA, USDZ. OpenUSD support covers ASCII USDA and uncompressed USDZ archives with an ASCII root layer.
@loaders.gl/scientific	NetCDF, NetCDF-4, Zarr, GeoZarr, OME-Zarr, SpatialData, GRIB2, HDF5, VTK, VTI, VTR, VTS, VTU, VTP. GRIB2, HDF5, NetCDF-4, and VTK readers have the implementation limits documented below.
@loaders.gl/splats	SPLAT, KSPLAT, SPZ, RAD.
@loaders.gl/sql	SQL, Arrow.
@loaders.gl/tables	Arrow, Feather, GeoArrow, Avro, AVSC, BSON, CSV, TSV, DSV, Excel, XLS, XLSB, XLSM, XLSX, JSON, GeoJSON, NDJSON, JSONL, NDGeoJSON, GeoJSONL, LDGeoJSON, Lance, ORC, Parquet, GeoParquet, Delta Lake.
@loaders.gl/textures	KTX, KTX2, DDS, PVR, Basis Universal, Basis, Crunch, CRN, Radiance HDR, HDR, NPY.
@loaders.gl/tiles	MLT, MapLibre Tile, MVT, Mapbox Vector Tile, TileJSON, Mapbox Style, PMTiles.
@loaders.gl/tiles-3d	3D Tiles, B3DM, I3DM, PNTS, CMPT, subtree, 3TZ, I3S, SLPK, LEPCC, ArcGIS Web Scene, COPC, LAS, LAZ, Potree.
@loaders.gl/traces	Chrome Trace, Perfetto Trace, OpenTelemetry, OTLP, OTLP JSON, OTLP Protobuf, Jaeger, Zipkin, JSON, JSON Lines, NDJSON.
@loaders.gl/video	MP4, GIF. Availability depends on the runtime and installed codecs.
@loaders.gl/xml	XML, HTML.

loaders.gl is a collection of framework-independent loaders for geospatial, 3D, and large-data visualization, part of vis.gl.

Documentation

loaders.gl is extensively documented on the loaders.gl website.

References and credits

See References and credits for the people, upstream implementations, specifications and datasets behind loaders.gl. Each published package includes a source and license notice inventory.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Build and test workflows

• Run yarn install to install workspace dependencies.

• Run yarn build to build the modules, then yarn build-workers to generate worker bundles. Rebuild workers after each module build.

• Run yarn test-node for Node.js tests and yarn test-headless for Chromium tests, or yarn test for both.

• Run yarn lint fix to apply lint and formatting fixes.

• Run yarn test-website to install website dependencies and build the documentation site.

• Run yarn build-apps to run the tile-converter app build (currently the only app in this repository).

• Run yarn test-apps to exercise the tile-converter app test/build script when available.

See the development environment guide for runtime requirements and browser setup.

License

loaders.gl uses the MIT license.

Some individual loaders are forked from other open source code bases that are licensed under different but compatible permissive licenses such as Apache 2 or BSD.

Data, imagery and service content have their own terms, separate from the code license.

You can check the "Attributions" section for each loader module before you install it if the details matter to you.