Imagery courtesy of NASA EOSDIS GIBS · Blue Marble: Next Generation (public domain)
Web map engines have long forced a choice: engines with polished declarative APIs are easy to adopt but hard to extend beyond their built-in features, while engines that expose deep low-level control are powerful but demand steep expertise — and fully 3D globe applications usually leave no option but the latter. Navara is a general-purpose 3D globe map engine built to remove that trade-off. It streams real-world geospatial data — satellite imagery, terrain, 3D city models, and vector data — onto an interactive globe, and lets you present it the way your application needs: as a clean basemap for data visualization, styled per feature by attributes, or as a photorealistic scene with atmosphere, sunlight, and shadows.
Navara's answer to the trade-off is a tiered API. Capabilities are organized into four tiers, so you start with the simplicity of a declarative engine and drop down — as far as the render pipeline itself — only when you need more control:
- Declarative API — add sources and layers as plain config objects (basemaps, terrain, vector data, 3D Tiles); meshes, effects, and lights work the same declarative way.
- Plugins — ready-made bundles such as the photorealistic scene, first-person walking, DOM overlays, and the attribution UI; anyone can package and share their own plugin.
- Low-level API — per-feature styling by attributes (
FeatureEvaluator), feature picking, terrain sampling, and standalone geodetic/ECEF math utilities usable without the map engine. - Custom Descriptors — write your own mesh/effect/light descriptors with full access to the rendering engine's scene graph and render pipeline.
Under the hood, Navara implements the complex but reusable GIS logic in a Rust/WebAssembly core, and delegates drawing to libraries specialized in CG rendering — currently Three.js. Rendering is where GPU APIs and platforms vary the most, so keeping that layer swappable is what lets Navara expand to other rendering engines and platforms in the future.
Navara is part of the MapLibre ecosystem. For discussions, join the #maplibre channel on the OSM-US Slack (invite link).
- 📖 Documentation: https://navara-docs.netlify.app/
- 🌏 Live examples: https://navara-preview.netlify.app/
See What is Navara? for an overview and Getting Started to build your first globe.
You have to install the following environment.
- Rust (stable)
- Node.js (LTS)
- pnpm
cargo install cargo-make
cargo install cargo-watch
cargo install wasm-bindgen-cli --version 0.2.126
rustup component add rust-srcOptional: Install binaryen for wasm-opt optimization: https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen
rust-src is required by release WASM builds, which rebuild std with -Z build-std for smaller binaries.
You need to run this command first time.
cargo make preparecargo make devAn error is displayed in the Web browser, but this is because the compilation of WASM has not been completed. Wait a little and when the compilation of WASM is completed, reload the page and it will be displayed correctly.
Alternatively, use web if you are working on the web side (using release rust builds + debug web builds)
cargo make webPlease take a screenshot when you add/update an example in navara_three/example.
pnpm navara_three screenshots {PAGE_NAME}See docs/README.md for details.
pnpm dev:docs # Start dev server
pnpm build:docs # Build for production
pnpm preview:docs # Preview production buildCopyright (c) 2026 MapLibre contributors
Licensed under either of
- Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
- MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
at your option.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.