title: offline tileserver for whole planet
body: <p>I'm trying to build an offline tileserver using the <code>planet.osm.pbf</code> files found <a href="http://download.geofabrik.de/" rel="nofollow">here</a> and I've hit a bit of a scaling problem.</p>
  
  <p>My first attempt was to render some of this data into an <code>.mbtiles</code> file and serve it with <code>Tilemill</code>.  This works very well up to a certain zoom level, but then the size of the pre-rendered tiles explodes. My guess at the appropriate solution is to pre-render tiles down to some reasonable zoom level and then have a mechanism for rendering the remaining zoom levels on the fly. Alternatively, I understand that there are vector-based tiles that are (maybe?) always efficiently rendered on the fly in the browser (<code>mapbox gl</code> does this, I think).</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know of the best approach to setting up an offline tileserver at this scale?  A lot of the other answers I've seen deal with how to serve tiles for a specific city or state, but I'm not coming up with much for showing the whole planet.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>
  
  <p>EDIT:</p>
  
  <p>Alternatively, if there are other formats in which the planet-wide data is available other than <code>planet.osm.pbf</code> I'm definitely open to hearing about it -- I'm not tied to the specific datasource, I'm just trying to solve the problem.</p>