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Xpublish ecosystem overview

Xpublish is a FastAPI-based framework for serving xarray datasets via HTTP APIs, enabling web-based access to scientific datasets. The ecosystem follows a plugin-oriented architecture with an intentionally small core library, and most user-facing capabilities are added by separate plugins.

Foundation

  • xpublish — core library that defines plugin extension points and an xpublish accessor for serving xarray datasets over HTTP APIs.

Plugins

  • xpublish-tiles (source) — transforms xarray datasets into raster and vector tiles. Provides OGC Tiles and OGC WMS endpoints as separate plugins (TilesPlugin and WMSPlugin). The detail page covers its grid-system support (regular, curvilinear, triangular, SELFE, polar, cubed-sphere, HEALPix), tile API surface, and rendering pipeline.
  • xpublish-wms — a dedicated Web Map Service implementation. Requires CF-compliant datasets. Predates xpublish-tiles' WMS plugin and is the more mature WMS path today.
  • xpublish-edr — routers for the OGC EDR API, supporting position, area, and cube queries; useful for time-series and profile extraction rather than map tiles.
  • opendap-protocol — bare-minimum implementation of the DAP 2.0 protocol, for clients that expect OPeNDAP semantics.

For a side-by-side comparison with the TiTiler ecosystem covering input formats, grid support, endpoints, tile-request parameters, resampling, and deployment, see the Dynamic tiling ecosystem comparison.