January 23, 2026
Raster maps, GeoJSON overlays, and real-world cartography — without leaving Ruby.
Over the last months, I’ve been working on libgd-gis , a GIS rendering engine built on top of libgd and designed specifically for Ruby developers who need static map generation without relying on browser-based toolchains or heavyweight GIS stacks.
This article walks through the motivation, architecture, and recent features — including native GeoJSON Point support — illustrated with real examples.
Why libgd-gis?
Ruby has excellent libraries for data processing, APIs, and background jobs — but when it comes to map rendering , the ecosystem is thin:
- Browser-based stacks (Mapbox GL, Leaflet) require JS, tileservers, and headless rendering
- Traditional GIS tools (GDAL, QGIS) are powerful but heavy and non-Ruby-native
- Generating static images for reports, thumbnails, PDFs, or background jobs is surprisingly hard
libgd-gis was created to fill that gap:
A server-side, Ruby-native GIS engine for generating static maps using raster tiles and vector overlays.
👉 Read the full article.
https://rubystacknews.com/2026/01/23/libgd-gis-a-practical-gis-rendering-engine-for-ruby/
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