Render your first tile

The shortest possible render

hillshade.json keeps all of its data remote, so this needs only the CLI:

ezu tile \
  --style https://raw.githubusercontent.com/reearth/ezu/main/crates/ezu/examples/styles/hillshade.json \
  --tile 11/1813/807 --out fuji.png

--tile takes z/x/y in the usual XYZ scheme. Output format follows the extension (.png or .webp, lossless).

A style from scratch

A style is a JSON document with a nodes map and an output reference. Nothing else is required. Start with a solid colour:

mine.json

{
  "name": "mine",
  "nodes": {
    "bg": { "op": "solid", "color": "#fbf6e6" }
  },
  "output": "@bg"
}

ezu tile --style mine.json --tile 13/7276/3225 --out mine.png

One node, one colour. Every style starts here.

A cream square. Now add data. Declare an MVT source, select a layer, fill it, and composite the fill over the background:

mine.json

{
  "name": "mine",
  "pad": 8,
  "sources": {
    "basemap": { "type": "mvt", "url": "https://papers.reearth.land/protomaps/tilejson.json" }
  },
  "nodes": {
    "bg":    { "op": "solid", "color": "#fbf6e6" },
    "water_f": { "op": "features", "layer": "water" },
    "water": { "op": "fill-solid", "features": "@water_f", "fill": "#5876a0" },
    "out":   { "op": "blend", "base": "@bg", "over": "@water" }
  },
  "output": "@out"
}

Water polygons from the vector tile, filled flat and composited over the background.

That URL is a live TileJSON endpoint, so the snippet renders as written — the data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, © Protomaps. Swap it for your own MVT or PMTiles source when you have one.

Three things to notice:

• @name wires nodes together. fill-solid reads its geometry from the features node; blend reads two rasters. That is the whole graph syntax.
• The order in nodes means nothing. Evaluation order comes from the references, not the file. The blend chain is what puts water on top of the background.
• output must be a Raster. features produces Features, which cannot be the output — the graph type-checks this at build time, before any pixel is drawn.

Make it painterly

Swap the flat fill for a scatter-dab fill and the map stops looking styled:

"water": {
  "op": "fill-dabs",
  "features": "@water_f",
  "color": "#5876a0", "opacity": 0.22,
  "radius-px": 7, "spacing-px": 3
}

The same water, painted as scatter dabs instead of filled.

fill-dabs places dabs on a world-anchored grid, so the wash continues across tile borders instead of restarting at each edge. Blur the result and it reads as wet paint:

"soft": { "op": "blur", "input": "@water", "sigma": 3 },
"out":  { "op": "blend", "base": "@bg", "over": "@soft" }

A small blur over the composite reads as the paper wicking.

Blur needs pixels from beyond the tile edge to stay seamless, which is what pad is for — and you do not have to size it. The graph knows how far each filter reaches and the renderer pads the canvas to match, so the pad: 8 above could be left out entirely. ezu check prints what it settled on:

ezu check mine.json --no-fetch
# INFO pad: 8 declared, 17 needed — rendering with 17

Write pad when you paint wider than your geometry — a thick stroke, a large dab radius — since a width can be an expression and so cannot be known in advance. See padding and neighbours.

For real brush strokes, load a brush through sources and use line or stroke:

"sources": {
  "pencil": { "type": "brush", "src": "file:brushes/pencil.myb" }
},
"nodes": {
  "roads": { "op": "line", "features": "@roads_f", "brush": "@pencil",
             "color": "#333", "radius-px": 1.2 }
}

Check before you render

ezu check mine.json              # parse + build graph + resolve assets
ezu check mine.json --no-fetch   # offline: parse + graph only

ezu check exits non-zero on a bad reference, a type mismatch, a cycle, or a missing asset — the same validation the renderer runs, without rendering. Wire it into CI (validate in CI).

To see the shape of what you built:

ezu graph mine.json          # Mermaid `graph LR` of the node dependencies

Next

• The live editor — edit and watch the tile update.
• Node catalog — all 82 ops with their fields.
• Bounding boxes and pyramids — render more than one tile.