Types

MapLibre style contains values of various types, most commonly as values for the style properties of a layer.

Color

The color type is a color in the sRGB color space. Colors are JSON strings in a variety of permitted formats: HTML-style hex values, RGB, RGBA, HSL, and HSLA. Predefined HTML colors names, like yellow and blue, are also permitted.

{
    "line-color": "#ff0",
    "line-color": "#ffff00",
    "line-color": "rgb(255, 255, 0)",
    "line-color": "rgba(255, 255, 0, 1)",
    "line-color": "hsl(100, 50%, 50%)",
    "line-color": "hsla(100, 50%, 50%, 1)",
    "line-color": "yellow"
}

Formatted

The formatted type is a string broken into sections annotated with separate formatting options.

{
    "text-field": ["format",
        "foo", { "font-scale": 1.2 },
        "bar", { "font-scale": 0.8 }
    ]
}

ResolvedImage

The resolvedImage type is an image (e.g., an icon or pattern) which is used in a layer. An input to the image expression operator is checked against the current map style to see if it is available to be rendered or not, and the result is returned in the resolvedImage type. This approach allows developers to define a series of images which the map can fall back to if previous images are not found, which cannot be achieved by providing, for example, icon-image with a plain string (because multiple strings cannot be supplied to icon-image and multiple images cannot be defined in a string).

{
    "icon-image": ["coalesce", ["image", "myImage"], ["image", "fallbackImage"]]
}

String

A string is text. In MapLibre styles, strings are in quotes.

{
    "source": "mySource"
}

Boolean

Boolean means yes or no, so it accepts the values true or false.

{
    "fill-enabled": true
}

Number

A number value, often an integer or floating point (decimal number). Written without quotes.

{
    "text-size": 24
}

Array

Arrays are comma-separated lists of one or more values in a specific order. For example, they're used in line dash arrays, in which the numbers specify intervals of line, break, and line again. If an array is used as an argument in an expression, the array must be wrapped in a literal expression.

{
    "line-dasharray": [2, 4]
}

{
    "circle-color": ["in", 1, ["literal", [1, 2, 3]]]
}

Point

Points are two-element numeric arrays representing [x, y] coordinate pairs. Units and other interpretations of the x/y values depend on where and how the point type is used.

{
    "line-translate": [2, 4]
}

Enum

Enums are a closed set of possible string values. Failing to provide a value within the closed set will result in an error.

{
    "circle-translate-anchor": "viewport"
}

Padding

SDK Support	MapLibre GL JS	MapLibre Native Android	MapLibre Native iOS
Single number	0.10.0	2.0.1	2.0.0
Array of numbers	2.2.0	❌ (#2363)	❌ (#2363)

An array of numbers with syntax similar to CSS:

• A single value applies to all four sides, e.g. [2];
• two values apply to [top/bottom, left/right], e.g. [2, 3];
• three values apply to [top, left/right, bottom] e.g. [2, 3, 1];
• four values apply to [top, right, bottom, left], e.g. [2, 3, 1, 0].

A single number is accepted for backwards-compatibility, and treated the same as a one-element array — padding applied to all sides.

The following example applies 2em padding on top and bottom and 3em padding left and right.

{
    "icon-padding": [2, 3]
}