Documentation → How-to guides

Publish and share a map

A share link turns a map into a page anyone can open — no account, no sign-in — and into an iframe you can paste into a site, a wiki or a report. You can revoke it at any time, and until you do, the link is the only credential it needs.

Create the link

Open the map and choose Share map.
Choose Create share link.
Copy whichever of the three forms you need.

What you copy	Looks like	Use it for
Share link	`/s/…`	Sending to a person. A full page with the map's title, description and a preview card.
Embed code	an `<iframe>`	Pasting into a page you control.
Embed URL	`/e/…`	The chrome-free map on its own, for a custom iframe or an app.

The link is the credential. Anyone who has it can view every layer in that map, and can pass it on. There is no password and no per-viewer access list. Share pages are marked noindex so search engines do not list them, but treat a share URL as public the moment it leaves your hands.

What a viewer gets

The map, at the view you saved, with every visible layer and its styling.
The map's description, shown on the map itself. This is where the meaning of your styling has to live — a legend supplies swatches, not what they mean.
Attribution for every layer that has it, in the map's own credits control.
Nothing else. A viewer cannot edit the map, see your other datasets, reach your account, or download the source files.

Pasting a share link into Slack, Notion or a chat produces a preview card — the map's name and a generated image, not a screenshot of the map itself. Sites that support oEmbed (Notion, WordPress, Medium) turn a pasted share link into the live embed on their own, so you often need only the share link even when you want the iframe.

Sharing a single dataset

Datasets have their own Share action, which publishes just that layer rather than a whole composed map. Same three forms, same revocation, same rule about the link being the credential. Use a map share when the composition and styling are the point; use a dataset share when the layer is.

Attribution and licence obligations

If a dataset in the map carries attribution, the share page publishes it — in the map's credits control, in the page markup that a link-preview crawler reads, and on the preview card. That redundancy is on purpose: the three are read by different things, and only one of them runs JavaScript.

mapbench states obligations, it never blocks a publish. If a layer's licence carries conditions, the share dialog says so and lets you proceed. It follows that the warning is the entire mechanism — read it, and record licence and attribution on your datasets before you publish rather than after. mapbench is not a legal review, and nothing here is a warranty that a publication is permitted.

Revoking

Open Share map and choose Revoke link. The page, the embed and the map's tiles all stop being reachable through that link immediately — there is no cache to wait out and no expiry to schedule around. Any page that embedded it shows an empty frame from that moment.

Revoking does not affect the map, the datasets or anyone's in-app access. It ends one public URL.

Rotating a link, and expiry

A share link can be rotated — replaced with a fresh URL, killing the old one — and can be minted with an expiry. Both are available through the API and to a connected agent rather than in the share dialog. Rotating is the right move when a link has spread further than you meant and you still want the map published; revoking is right when you want it gone.

Who can publish

Publishing is a deliberate step, and credentials reflect that. A person working in the app can always share a map they can write. An API key cannot — no key preset grants sharing, because turning revocable in-org access into an unauthenticated public URL should not be something a long-lived credential does by default. An OAuth connector can, because the permission is named on a consent screen you read and the grant is revocable from your account page. API keys, scopes and projects has the full table.

Troubleshooting

The embed is blank, or the frame is empty: Either the link was revoked, or you embedded the share link (/s/…) rather than the embed URL (/e/…). The share link deliberately refuses to be framed; the embed URL is the one built for it. Use the Embed code field and you get the right one.
A layer is missing from the published map: Check it is visible in the editor and that its dataset is Ready. A layer whose dataset is still processing, or errored, is simply absent from the share rather than shown broken.
The preview card does not show my map: It is not supposed to. The card is a generated graphic carrying the map's name and the shape of its extents, not a render — rendering the real map would need a headless graphics stack per unfurl.
The link works for me but not for a colleague: Then you are testing while signed in. Open it in a private window. If it fails there, it was revoked or the token is truncated — share links are long, and a chat client that wrapped the URL is the usual culprit.
I want to un-publish everything at once: There is no single switch. Revoke each link from the map or dataset it belongs to; your account page lists what you have minted.