January 9, 2026 How I built a pure-Ruby GIS engine that renders Paris, Tokyo, New York, and more Most people don’t think of Ruby when they think about maps, GIS, or visual computing. If you want to draw a real city, the standard stack usually looks like: QGIS PostGIS Mapnik Mapbox or a heavy JavaScript…

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RUBYLAND

A developer built two open-source Ruby libraries (ruby-libgd and libgd-gis) that enable pure-Ruby GIS rendering without external dependencies like PostGIS or Mapbox. The system loads GeoJSON data, applies Mercator projection, and rasterizes it to PNG using native GD graphics bindings. Successfully tested by rendering Paris, Tokyo, New York, and Paraná with real OpenStreetMap data, it enables scriptable map generation for Rails apps, PDFs, reports, and static sites—opening new possibilities for civic tech, urban planning, journalism, and data science workflows.

Ruby Can Draw Cities Now

How I built a pure-Ruby GIS engine that renders Paris, Tokyo, New York, and more

This is great, I’d like to do this:
<pre><code>&lt;noscript&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;map.png&quot;&gt;&lt;/noscript&gt;
</code></pre>

Never used ruby but good for us I guess