13 ms·

Maps.earth – free and open-source web maps

696 points by ellenhp 4y ago

Hey everyone, a while back I posted about an open-source maps project I was working on called Headway. I just wanted to share an exciting update. I made a few architectural improvements with the help of some really awesome contributors and Headway can now run full-planet instances. I'm really excited with what we've managed to come up with. Right now the full-planet demo server is in Germany and lives at [1]. A brief explanation is at [2]. I'm hopeful that the project will continue to improve with time and eventually end up being a real contender in the web maps space. I'm talking with folks about the potential for getting some more robust hosting options too which is very exciting. For the moment though, Headway has some usability issues. It's missing ETAs, has no steps list for directions, or proper geocoding search results page, etc. I'm going to get to these issues with time, but please drop me a line if you're interested in helping out. Especially interested in help with web frontend, design, or internationalization. Development takes place on GitHub [3] and discussions tend to happen in the matrix room [4]. [1] https://maps.earth/ https://maps.earth/ [2] https://about.maps.earth/ https://about.maps.earth/ [3] https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway [4] https://matrix.to/#/#headway:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#headway:matrix.org

whitten 4y ago
Is there any support for non-earth maps ? Such as for a DnD campaign or a story set in Middle Earth ? Or even a war game on Earth but with different place names and countries borders names, etc ?
- hackernewds 4y ago
  What
- Bedon292 4y ago
  It is all based on OSM data. And I haven't checked in a few months but I believe Maplibre, which is doing the rendering, require the tiles all be in Web Mercator, which is an earth based coordinate system. So you would probably need to hack together something to change the underlying data into what you want. The easiest one would be changing place names and borders on Earth.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
antman 4y ago
Is it a web app? A web service?
- lkbm 4y ago
  You can use it as a web service by visiting https://maps.earth/ https://maps.earth/
abetusk 4y ago
I'm a little confused as to what this actually is. Is this a route planning built on top of OSM? Does this bundle OSM data "all in one" so that you can more easily host an OSM server?
- ellenhp 4y ago
  OSM doesn't have a server per se (other than the OSM API server). It's a dataset for the most part. Headway lets you bring up a server that will render maps tiles, allows you to search for places and get routes between places. It's trying to be a user-friendly UI for various pieces of the OSM ecosystem. There are a lot of amazing pieces of software out there that work with OSM data, but there isn't an easy way to bring them up, and there's no unified frontend for all of them other than Headway (that I know of). Edit: To the comments telling me I'm wrong about this, remember that Headway has a geocoder and routing system, along with a transit trip planner (currently disabled on maps.earth though). These are not things you could get with off-the-shelf solutions that include a GUI until now. I also want to self-host my mapping software for privacy reasons, and Headway makes that easy too. I probably need to be better about explaining what all Headway does that's different than just bringing up an OSM tileserver though. Thank you all for the feedback :)
  - chess_buster 4y ago
    Thanks. It would be great if this could be stated on the page. I kept hackernews open in order that someone would explain to me what this actually does. Your comment thankfully fullfilled this.
    - ellenhp 4y ago
      Thank you for the feedback :)
  - soheil 4y ago
    There no frontend to bring up an OSM? Literally you need a single line to load one up: (new map('map_div')).addLayer(new TileLayer('http://{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png'))
DonnyV 4y ago
Didn't have my address in NJ.
- tuukkah 4y ago
  You should be able to add it at https://openstreetmap.org https://openstreetmap.org :-)
  - jmkb 4y ago
    But don't expect it to show up on maps.earth right away... it looks like it's at least a month behind OSM at this point.
    - ellenhp 4y ago
      That's mostly because I decided to use maps from the daylight maps distribution. The current tiles were actually built last night. I think it probably makes sense to track planet.osm.pbf directly though because I want to create a virtuous cycle where users feel that contributing to OSM has a real tangible payoff. The main issue with updating regularly is going to be that long-term I can't really afford a beefy enough machine that has a fast uplink to Cloudflare where my artifacts are hosted. Getting all of the planet-sized artifacts uploaded even just this one time was a huge pain. I ended up having to generate them on my desktop, ferry the data to a friend's house on a laptop via motorcycle and upload them from there. This is one of the things that I want to help remedy if I get enough support via Liberapay or GH Sponsors.
      - Aeolun 4y ago
        It doesn’t pull the OSM data (from their servers)? Or you did that once and pre-processed everything now? I presume you can do something similar for the daily and minutely updates, but I imagine merging that with the existing stuff is more work.
      - tuukkah 4y ago
        Have you explored whether it would be possible to upload only the changed parts?
paxys 4y ago
I tried the hosted app at https://maps.earth https://maps.earth but it isn't really usable at present. How do you actually search for and navigate to places?
- ellenhp 4y ago
  The search box in the top left should bring up a bunch of autocomplete suggestions when you type stuff into it. Clicking on one brings up a place card view [1]. If my demo server falls over that will fail to populate. Once you have a place card you can hit "bike there" or something and then populate the "From" field that appears again in the top left to get a directions view [2]. Not ideal, the frontend was built in a few weeks by someone with very little frontend experience (me) so I did my best. [1] https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F12903132 https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F12903... [2] https://maps.earth/directions/bicycle/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F12903132/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F37057155 https://maps.earth/directions/bicycle/openstreetmap%3Avenue%...
  - paxys 4y ago
    I guess it may be failing due to the request spike. Even otherwise, searching for common places like "San Francisco" or "New York" shows a dozen results all over Europe and South America, not the one place most people would be looking for. Street address search doesn't seem to work either.
  - owenpalmer 4y ago
    Not working for me either. No results show up, even for common places like LA.
    - ellenhp 4y ago
      Yeah, I've noticed that at least the way Pelias is configured in Headway, searches for administrative areas don't seem to work, like at all. I'm not sure if that's a config issue or an issue with Pelias though. Address search should definitely work as long as there's an appropriately tagged OSM node for your address, but the server's load average is 40 on a 6 core OVH box in Germany so you might have to be (very) patient to get anything back until the load drops to a level it can deal with.
lambda_dn 4y ago
ElCheapo 4y ago
I just asked for directions from my home to the railway station and the navigator told me to enter a roundabout in the opposite direction :/
- uneekname 4y ago
  The direction of that roundabout might be mis-tagged on OpenStreetMap. Would you be comfortable sending me the location, so I can see about fixing it?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ElCheapo 4y ago
    Forget that, I erroneously asked for walking directions my bad. Shame I can't delete the comment lol
soheil 4y ago
Can you tell us what this even is before telling us how sorry you are that it’s not perfect?
- ellenhp 4y ago
  It's a self-hostable web maps stack trying to be an open-source alternative to Google Maps.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
playingalong 4y ago
I like the fact it uses Earthly for building. Nice pun.
joekrill 4y ago
Wow this is pretty amazing. For those that haven't tried, it's really difficult to piece this sort of thing together. So the fact that this is all provided as a Docker Compose configuration is really awesome.
tuukkah 4y ago
Link to the previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31536217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31536217 Congrats on all the progress in 3 months!
shafyy 4y ago
Hey, this looks great, thanks for working on it! I'm the creator of Mapzy[0], an open-source and self-hostable store finder. We're trying to focus on privacy as much as possible, but currently use Mapbox since it's better than Google Maps and we didn't find any other alternatives. Do you think Headway could be a replacement for us? We currently use the Mapbox JS library to create the pins etc. - could we use Headway with Leaflet JS for example? We also use the Mapbox geocoder, mainly for reverse geocoding of addresses. How does Headway's geocoder compare? 0: https://github.com/mapzy/mapzy/ https://github.com/mapzy/mapzy/
- Bedon292 4y ago
  Have you looked into Nominatim [1] for reverse geocoding? [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim
  - ellenhp 4y ago
    Nominatim requires a lot of resources for full planet installs. I'd recommend looking into Pelias or Photon instead. They're both amazing. Headway has used both of them at various points. Photon is definitely easier to set up for the planet, though, you can just download a pre-computed search index from GraphHopper and you're good to go.
  - shafyy 4y ago
    I haven't. Thanks for the recommendation!
- jutaz 4y ago
  I’d recommend taking a look at Maplibre GL JS[0], which is a fully open source map library. It was forked from Mapbox GL JS just before licence change, therefore it’s also fully compatible with the style spec etc. It’s also actively maintained and has a strong community behind it. 0: https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-js https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-js
  - twelvechairs 4y ago
alexalx666 4y ago
Is it possible to access it via less js heavy frontend? Owner of Nokia N900 here :D Would great to have Ghost in the Shell style super lightweight maps
- ellenhp 4y ago
  Unfortunately no. maplibre-gl-js requires webgl for vector tile rendering. That's how you get snappy zoom performance, reduce the load on the end-user's cellular connection, etc. Sick phone though I'm a little bit jealous :)
  - alexalx666 4y ago
    I can also imagine requesting route via terminal and getting just list of directions which is many times enough
    - tuukkah 4y ago
      I have seen (but cannot find now) a command line tool that you give two addresses, it queries OpenTripPlanner for itineraries and displays the result using walking, train etc. Unicode emojis.
      - alexalx666 4y ago
        thanks! it works via REST/GQL apis so should be easy to write a cli
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    You wouldn't be as jealous if you knew how hard it is to find batteries these days.
    - alexalx666 4y ago
      I found a 1600mAh one from AkkuKing on German Amazon, I thought it will be harder,
codethief 4y ago
Very impressive! Is it just me (Firefox on Android) or does the UI really not allow tapping landmarks (shops, restaurants, subway stations)? Also, directions don't seem to work right now (infinite loading) but I suppose this is due to the server receiving the HN hug of death right now. By the way, for anyone looking for the mobile (non-web) version of this: Organic Maps is a fantastic frontend for OpenStreetMaps (and of course there's the good old OsmAnd, though I like Organic Maps better these days).
- jonas-w 4y ago
  Thanks for Organic Maps! The website doesn't seem to work for me either on mobile.
- sorenjan 4y ago
  OsmAnd doesn't seem to get many updates nowadays. I get that it's open source and we can't demand anything for free and all that, but they have some monetization options that should bring in some money, but aren't really worth the price IMO. The issue tracker is full of bugs and feature requests marked as nice to have, but almost nothing happens.
- oynqr 4y ago
  Recently switched from Osmand to Organic and am quite impressed. Rendering and routing are much faster and there are no crashes even with very long routes.
  - ssl232 4y ago
    Agreed, it's so much more pretty and the UI is slick. With Osmand I always seem to end up with stuff on the map from a previous search/navigation that I don't want any more, but can't figure out how to get rid of.
throwayyy479087 4y ago
A usable example would make this much more effective brochureware.
- oynqr 4y ago
  Like https://maps.earth https://maps.earth ?
  - throwayyy479087 4y ago
    Huh - rendered a totally different page on my desktop
vanous 4y ago
This is amazing, thank you very much! It is really tempting to spin up a small instance for hyper local maps.
- ellenhp 4y ago
  If you do spin one up, feel free to join the matrix and share the experience or just email me with feedback. I'm trying to get this as frictionless as possible to set up because I want people to own their own location data. Headway is much much more responsive on a local scale than it is in https://maps.earth/ https://maps.earth/ and the search results are more relevant too. My own personal instance for Seattle has largely replaced Google Maps for me. :)
c0nsumer 4y ago
This seems really neat. I have a question that I hope isn't something I'm missing, but is there an easy way to change the rendering ruleset? I ask because I've been wanting to build some custom maps for mountain bike trails in the state where I live and have them served up similarly. Whenever I've looked into other projects for this it's either focused on rendering tiles from Mapbox data (where not all the OSM tags -- especially not MTBing ones -- are available) or really old info or presumes that someone else will be generating tiles.
- ellenhp 4y ago
  This is tracked here: https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/issues/85 https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/issues/85 It's going to be somewhat tricky because of a few mediocre decisions I made early on in the development process, but if you were up for helping out I'd love to get a bring-your-own-style experience working in Headway. Long-term, I want to add the ability to easily brand Headway and customize it for your own needs without forking it.
  - c0nsumer 4y ago
    Thanks for pointing me there. I'll give it a read and see what I might be able to do.
sorenjan 4y ago
How do you handle map data updates? Do you regenerate everything from scratch from the full data set, or can you update it incrementally with patches? Is it possible to put the tiles on a CDN like cloudflare?
KoftaBob 4y ago
Awesome work! What are your thoughts on the feasibility/benefits of using a p2p system like IPFS to share OSM map/tile data between users, rather than serving from one centralized server?
- ellenhp 4y ago
  It's... complicated. The discussion for it is here, I'd be curious if you had any thoughts in particular about this. Feel free to comment or join the headway Matrix room if you want to chat more in-depth. In principle I'm open to this but the privacy implications are a little weird. https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/issues/50 https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/issues/50
deleted 4y ago
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ajsnigrutin 4y ago
How much resources does something like this use? (full planet, few (<10) users)? Disk, RAM, cpu cores?
- ellenhp 4y ago
  I cover that in the readme, but the short answer is that the server running maps.earth has 64GB of RAM and 6 physical cores. It's using about 600GB of disk space, but the disk usage might change because I suspect my Pelias index is missing a lot of information. https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway#system-requirements https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway#system-requirements
koinedad 4y ago
Love the idea of freeing up map data
abhaysrivastav 4y ago
This looks so clean.
clementmas 4y ago
Is the data shared between vector tiles, geocoding and directions? Or is each feature pulling its data from a different index?
- ellenhp 4y ago
  During data preprocessing it all comes from the same OSM extract, except for Pelias which also pulls data in from Who's On First, and Planetiler which also pulls data in from Natural Earth (and a few other sources). At runtime tiles are served over the wire but everything else happens server-side. So it's a bit of everything :D
- karussell 4y ago
  I don't think they share the index as all three parts are different projects.
karussell 4y ago
Thanks for this. I'm curious to know: why did you include two routing engines (OTP and valhalla)? Wouldn't e.g. OTP sufficient and use much less resources compared to 2 setups? And why not reuse one of the existing open source map or directions front-ends?
- easrng 4y ago
  Looks like they use either mapbox gl is or maplibre gl js to render the map
  - karussell 4y ago
    I meant there are many ready-to-use map UIs out there already, like the UI from OTP or valhalla itself. No need to reinvent the wheel. E.g. see https://valhalla.openstreetmap.de/ https://valhalla.openstreetmap.de/ Or https://github.com/Qwant/erdapfel https://github.com/Qwant/erdapfel Or https://graphhopper.com/maps2 https://graphhopper.com/maps2 & https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper-maps https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper-maps (disclaimer: I'm a contributor there)
- ellenhp 4y ago
  OTP is a resource hog (for good reason, it solves a harder problem than valhalla). Covering a US state is very much pushing it for OTP, and covering the planet wouldn't work at all on any hardware. I didn't use OTP's frontend because I found it unpleasant to use. Valhalla's frontend wouldn't work well with OTP and I don't find it terribly pleasant to use either. Neither work on mobile, and neither work with vector maps, it seems? I haven't tried out GraphHopper's UI though.
ragazzina 4y ago
What language is it in? In Italy, most of the cities have the Italian name, some of them have an English name (Florence, Naples), some have a German name (Triest). The behaviour is different than OSM, at least for me.
- habi 4y ago
  - Triest is mapped with several names (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/179180 https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/179180), ‘Trieste’ being the standard one. - Naples is mapped with many names (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/40767 https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/40767), ‘Napoli’ being the standard one. - Florence (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/42602 https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/42602) has ‘Firenze’ as standard name. A renderer can choose which name to put as label on the map, usually it’s `name` or `name:locallanguage-abbreviated`.
sandos 4y ago
Wow, it is fast! I could see it had my test-route drawn and ready before the scrolling animation to the start had even finished.
ygra 4y ago
A few things that I notice in the area where I'm somewhat active as an OSM contributor: - You probably shouldn't render guideposts or route markers on the map, or at least not with generic "info" icon. - Things with access=private are likely not terribly relevant to people looking at the map. This will include things like parking spots or gardens. - Lots of shots and amenities have icons, but doctors don't. Neither do fire stations. - Sports pitches are shown as nodes, but may be better shown as areas, since they often cover quite extensive swaths of ground that's otherwise empty with just an icon in the middle. Same with playgrounds, schools, and kindergartens, gardens, and parks. - For buildings and building parts, if you don't make use of the parts in any way (such as showing roofs, height, etc.) perhaps just disregard the parts and only render the building outlines. This, combined with the fact that geometries seem to be simplified, even at the highest zoom levels, results in a bit of a mess of lines at times where some outlines are simplified differently from others that should actually share parts of the same edges and thus overlap perfectly. (e.g. https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F111206435 https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F11120... or https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F111206435 https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F11120...). Same thing with the geometry simplification also happens with adjacent geometry that should actually not have gaps (e.g. semidetached houses or garages next to houses). Lots of buildings that are actually rectangular also get quite weird angles. - Tunnels are quite subtle. And while at least roads in tunnels don't overlap buildings that are actually above them (like with Carto) it's still hard to make out what's above and what's below in such cases (e.g. https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Astreet%3Apolyline%3A30081121 https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Astreet%3Apolyline%3...). Culverts for waterways are handled better than roads in tunnels in this case. Overall though, this seems like a quite nice map style. Closer to Google Maps in that it emphasizes roads, but some people like the less detailed look (and it works better with vector maps, I guess, to have fewer polygons to render).
- ellenhp 4y ago
  I'm using OSM Liberty [1] so as far as I know I should be just tracking upstream with most of these issues, but I think some of them might actually be introduced by planetiler [2]. Thanks for giving it such a detailed look though. [1] https://github.com/maputnik/osm-liberty https://github.com/maputnik/osm-liberty [2] https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/issues/324 https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/issues/324
paxvinci 4y ago
I have found an error in a street name. Where could I report it?
- karussell 4y ago
  On https://www.openstreetmap.org https://www.openstreetmap.org See the tutorial there or https://learnosm.org/en/beginner/start-osm/ https://learnosm.org/en/beginner/start-osm/
murphyslab 4y ago
Works surprisingly well! One note for walking directions: It doesn't seem to take elevation gain into account in choosing between alternate routes. Probably a not an easy thing to implement.
WhyNotHugo 4y ago
This is very interesting (and impressive work). I've been thinking for quite some time that it would be very useful to have a local map server for offline use. A lot of applications need to show data related to location (e.g.: a photo app might want to show a map of where a photo was taken). Having a local service to resolve these would be superb. I know this product has a different goal, but I wonder if the backend side of it could actually fill in this role. Essentially exposing location/mapping services to local applications.

696 points by ellenhp 4y ago

whitten 4y ago

Is there any support for non-earth maps ? Such as for a DnD campaign or a story set in Middle Earth ? Or even a war game on Earth but with different place names and countries borders names, etc ?

hackernewds 4y ago
What
Bedon292 4y ago
It is all based on OSM data. And I haven't checked in a few months but I believe Maplibre, which is doing the rendering, require the tiles all be in Web Mercator, which is an earth based coordinate system. So you would probably need to hack together something to change the underlying data into what you want. The easiest one would be changing place names and borders on Earth.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

antman 4y ago

Is it a web app? A web service?

lkbm 4y ago
You can use it as a web service by visiting https://maps.earth/ https://maps.earth/

abetusk 4y ago

I'm a little confused as to what this actually is. Is this a route planning built on top of OSM? Does this bundle OSM data "all in one" so that you can more easily host an OSM server?

ellenhp 4y ago
OSM doesn't have a server per se (other than the OSM API server). It's a dataset for the most part. Headway lets you bring up a server that will render maps tiles, allows you to search for places and get routes between places. It's trying to be a user-friendly UI for various pieces of the OSM ecosystem. There are a lot of amazing pieces of software out there that work with OSM data, but there isn't an easy way to bring them up, and there's no unified frontend for all of them other than Headway (that I know of). Edit: To the comments telling me I'm wrong about this, remember that Headway has a geocoder and routing system, along with a transit trip planner (currently disabled on maps.earth though). These are not things you could get with off-the-shelf solutions that include a GUI until now. I also want to self-host my mapping software for privacy reasons, and Headway makes that easy too. I probably need to be better about explaining what all Headway does that's different than just bringing up an OSM tileserver though. Thank you all for the feedback :)
- chess_buster 4y ago
  Thanks. It would be great if this could be stated on the page. I kept hackernews open in order that someone would explain to me what this actually does. Your comment thankfully fullfilled this.
  - ellenhp 4y ago
    Thank you for the feedback :)
- soheil 4y ago
  There no frontend to bring up an OSM? Literally you need a single line to load one up: (new map('map_div')).addLayer(new TileLayer('http://{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png'))

DonnyV 4y ago

Didn't have my address in NJ.

tuukkah 4y ago
You should be able to add it at https://openstreetmap.org https://openstreetmap.org :-)
- jmkb 4y ago
  But don't expect it to show up on maps.earth right away... it looks like it's at least a month behind OSM at this point.
  - ellenhp 4y ago
    That's mostly because I decided to use maps from the daylight maps distribution. The current tiles were actually built last night. I think it probably makes sense to track planet.osm.pbf directly though because I want to create a virtuous cycle where users feel that contributing to OSM has a real tangible payoff. The main issue with updating regularly is going to be that long-term I can't really afford a beefy enough machine that has a fast uplink to Cloudflare where my artifacts are hosted. Getting all of the planet-sized artifacts uploaded even just this one time was a huge pain. I ended up having to generate them on my desktop, ferry the data to a friend's house on a laptop via motorcycle and upload them from there. This is one of the things that I want to help remedy if I get enough support via Liberapay or GH Sponsors.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      It doesn’t pull the OSM data (from their servers)? Or you did that once and pre-processed everything now? I presume you can do something similar for the daily and minutely updates, but I imagine merging that with the existing stuff is more work.
    - tuukkah 4y ago
      Have you explored whether it would be possible to upload only the changed parts?

paxys 4y ago

I tried the hosted app at https://maps.earth https://maps.earth but it isn't really usable at present. How do you actually search for and navigate to places?

ellenhp 4y ago
The search box in the top left should bring up a bunch of autocomplete suggestions when you type stuff into it. Clicking on one brings up a place card view [1]. If my demo server falls over that will fail to populate. Once you have a place card you can hit "bike there" or something and then populate the "From" field that appears again in the top left to get a directions view [2]. Not ideal, the frontend was built in a few weeks by someone with very little frontend experience (me) so I did my best. [1] https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F12903132 https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F12903... [2] https://maps.earth/directions/bicycle/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F12903132/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F37057155 https://maps.earth/directions/bicycle/openstreetmap%3Avenue%...
- paxys 4y ago
  I guess it may be failing due to the request spike. Even otherwise, searching for common places like "San Francisco" or "New York" shows a dozen results all over Europe and South America, not the one place most people would be looking for. Street address search doesn't seem to work either.
- owenpalmer 4y ago
  Not working for me either. No results show up, even for common places like LA.
  - ellenhp 4y ago
    Yeah, I've noticed that at least the way Pelias is configured in Headway, searches for administrative areas don't seem to work, like at all. I'm not sure if that's a config issue or an issue with Pelias though. Address search should definitely work as long as there's an appropriately tagged OSM node for your address, but the server's load average is 40 on a 6 core OVH box in Germany so you might have to be (very) patient to get anything back until the load drops to a level it can deal with.

lambda_dn 4y ago

ElCheapo 4y ago

I just asked for directions from my home to the railway station and the navigator told me to enter a roundabout in the opposite direction :/

uneekname 4y ago
The direction of that roundabout might be mis-tagged on OpenStreetMap. Would you be comfortable sending me the location, so I can see about fixing it?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ElCheapo 4y ago
  Forget that, I erroneously asked for walking directions my bad. Shame I can't delete the comment lol

soheil 4y ago

Can you tell us what this even is before telling us how sorry you are that it’s not perfect?

ellenhp 4y ago
It's a self-hostable web maps stack trying to be an open-source alternative to Google Maps.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

playingalong 4y ago

I like the fact it uses Earthly for building. Nice pun.

joekrill 4y ago

Wow this is pretty amazing. For those that haven't tried, it's really difficult to piece this sort of thing together. So the fact that this is all provided as a Docker Compose configuration is really awesome.

tuukkah 4y ago

Link to the previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31536217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31536217 Congrats on all the progress in 3 months!

shafyy 4y ago

Hey, this looks great, thanks for working on it! I'm the creator of Mapzy[0], an open-source and self-hostable store finder. We're trying to focus on privacy as much as possible, but currently use Mapbox since it's better than Google Maps and we didn't find any other alternatives. Do you think Headway could be a replacement for us? We currently use the Mapbox JS library to create the pins etc. - could we use Headway with Leaflet JS for example? We also use the Mapbox geocoder, mainly for reverse geocoding of addresses. How does Headway's geocoder compare? 0: https://github.com/mapzy/mapzy/ https://github.com/mapzy/mapzy/

Bedon292 4y ago
Have you looked into Nominatim [1] for reverse geocoding? [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim
- ellenhp 4y ago
  Nominatim requires a lot of resources for full planet installs. I'd recommend looking into Pelias or Photon instead. They're both amazing. Headway has used both of them at various points. Photon is definitely easier to set up for the planet, though, you can just download a pre-computed search index from GraphHopper and you're good to go.
- shafyy 4y ago
  I haven't. Thanks for the recommendation!
jutaz 4y ago
I’d recommend taking a look at Maplibre GL JS[0], which is a fully open source map library. It was forked from Mapbox GL JS just before licence change, therefore it’s also fully compatible with the style spec etc. It’s also actively maintained and has a strong community behind it. 0: https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-js https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-gl-js
- twelvechairs 4y ago

alexalx666 4y ago

Is it possible to access it via less js heavy frontend? Owner of Nokia N900 here :D Would great to have Ghost in the Shell style super lightweight maps

ellenhp 4y ago
Unfortunately no. maplibre-gl-js requires webgl for vector tile rendering. That's how you get snappy zoom performance, reduce the load on the end-user's cellular connection, etc. Sick phone though I'm a little bit jealous :)
- alexalx666 4y ago
  I can also imagine requesting route via terminal and getting just list of directions which is many times enough
  - tuukkah 4y ago
    I have seen (but cannot find now) a command line tool that you give two addresses, it queries OpenTripPlanner for itineraries and displays the result using walking, train etc. Unicode emojis.
    - alexalx666 4y ago
      thanks! it works via REST/GQL apis so should be easy to write a cli
- pessimizer 4y ago
  You wouldn't be as jealous if you knew how hard it is to find batteries these days.
  - alexalx666 4y ago
    I found a 1600mAh one from AkkuKing on German Amazon, I thought it will be harder,

codethief 4y ago

Very impressive! Is it just me (Firefox on Android) or does the UI really not allow tapping landmarks (shops, restaurants, subway stations)? Also, directions don't seem to work right now (infinite loading) but I suppose this is due to the server receiving the HN hug of death right now. By the way, for anyone looking for the mobile (non-web) version of this: Organic Maps is a fantastic frontend for OpenStreetMaps (and of course there's the good old OsmAnd, though I like Organic Maps better these days).

jonas-w 4y ago
Thanks for Organic Maps! The website doesn't seem to work for me either on mobile.
sorenjan 4y ago
OsmAnd doesn't seem to get many updates nowadays. I get that it's open source and we can't demand anything for free and all that, but they have some monetization options that should bring in some money, but aren't really worth the price IMO. The issue tracker is full of bugs and feature requests marked as nice to have, but almost nothing happens.
oynqr 4y ago
Recently switched from Osmand to Organic and am quite impressed. Rendering and routing are much faster and there are no crashes even with very long routes.
- ssl232 4y ago
  Agreed, it's so much more pretty and the UI is slick. With Osmand I always seem to end up with stuff on the map from a previous search/navigation that I don't want any more, but can't figure out how to get rid of.

throwayyy479087 4y ago

A usable example would make this much more effective brochureware.

oynqr 4y ago
Like https://maps.earth https://maps.earth ?
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  Huh - rendered a totally different page on my desktop

vanous 4y ago

This is amazing, thank you very much! It is really tempting to spin up a small instance for hyper local maps.

ellenhp 4y ago
If you do spin one up, feel free to join the matrix and share the experience or just email me with feedback. I'm trying to get this as frictionless as possible to set up because I want people to own their own location data. Headway is much much more responsive on a local scale than it is in https://maps.earth/ https://maps.earth/ and the search results are more relevant too. My own personal instance for Seattle has largely replaced Google Maps for me. :)

c0nsumer 4y ago

This seems really neat. I have a question that I hope isn't something I'm missing, but is there an easy way to change the rendering ruleset? I ask because I've been wanting to build some custom maps for mountain bike trails in the state where I live and have them served up similarly. Whenever I've looked into other projects for this it's either focused on rendering tiles from Mapbox data (where not all the OSM tags -- especially not MTBing ones -- are available) or really old info or presumes that someone else will be generating tiles.

ellenhp 4y ago
This is tracked here: https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/issues/85 https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/issues/85 It's going to be somewhat tricky because of a few mediocre decisions I made early on in the development process, but if you were up for helping out I'd love to get a bring-your-own-style experience working in Headway. Long-term, I want to add the ability to easily brand Headway and customize it for your own needs without forking it.
- c0nsumer 4y ago
  Thanks for pointing me there. I'll give it a read and see what I might be able to do.

sorenjan 4y ago

How do you handle map data updates? Do you regenerate everything from scratch from the full data set, or can you update it incrementally with patches? Is it possible to put the tiles on a CDN like cloudflare?

KoftaBob 4y ago

Awesome work! What are your thoughts on the feasibility/benefits of using a p2p system like IPFS to share OSM map/tile data between users, rather than serving from one centralized server?

ellenhp 4y ago
It's... complicated. The discussion for it is here, I'd be curious if you had any thoughts in particular about this. Feel free to comment or join the headway Matrix room if you want to chat more in-depth. In principle I'm open to this but the privacy implications are a little weird. https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/issues/50 https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/issues/50

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

How much resources does something like this use? (full planet, few (<10) users)? Disk, RAM, cpu cores?

ellenhp 4y ago
I cover that in the readme, but the short answer is that the server running maps.earth has 64GB of RAM and 6 physical cores. It's using about 600GB of disk space, but the disk usage might change because I suspect my Pelias index is missing a lot of information. https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway#system-requirements https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway#system-requirements

koinedad 4y ago

Love the idea of freeing up map data

abhaysrivastav 4y ago

This looks so clean.

clementmas 4y ago

Is the data shared between vector tiles, geocoding and directions? Or is each feature pulling its data from a different index?

ellenhp 4y ago
During data preprocessing it all comes from the same OSM extract, except for Pelias which also pulls data in from Who's On First, and Planetiler which also pulls data in from Natural Earth (and a few other sources). At runtime tiles are served over the wire but everything else happens server-side. So it's a bit of everything :D
karussell 4y ago
I don't think they share the index as all three parts are different projects.

karussell 4y ago

Thanks for this. I'm curious to know: why did you include two routing engines (OTP and valhalla)? Wouldn't e.g. OTP sufficient and use much less resources compared to 2 setups? And why not reuse one of the existing open source map or directions front-ends?

easrng 4y ago
Looks like they use either mapbox gl is or maplibre gl js to render the map
- karussell 4y ago
  I meant there are many ready-to-use map UIs out there already, like the UI from OTP or valhalla itself. No need to reinvent the wheel. E.g. see https://valhalla.openstreetmap.de/ https://valhalla.openstreetmap.de/ Or https://github.com/Qwant/erdapfel https://github.com/Qwant/erdapfel Or https://graphhopper.com/maps2 https://graphhopper.com/maps2 & https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper-maps https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper-maps (disclaimer: I'm a contributor there)
ellenhp 4y ago
OTP is a resource hog (for good reason, it solves a harder problem than valhalla). Covering a US state is very much pushing it for OTP, and covering the planet wouldn't work at all on any hardware. I didn't use OTP's frontend because I found it unpleasant to use. Valhalla's frontend wouldn't work well with OTP and I don't find it terribly pleasant to use either. Neither work on mobile, and neither work with vector maps, it seems? I haven't tried out GraphHopper's UI though.

ragazzina 4y ago

What language is it in? In Italy, most of the cities have the Italian name, some of them have an English name (Florence, Naples), some have a German name (Triest). The behaviour is different than OSM, at least for me.

habi 4y ago
- Triest is mapped with several names (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/179180 https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/179180), ‘Trieste’ being the standard one. - Naples is mapped with many names (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/40767 https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/40767), ‘Napoli’ being the standard one. - Florence (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/42602 https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/42602) has ‘Firenze’ as standard name. A renderer can choose which name to put as label on the map, usually it’s `name` or `name:locallanguage-abbreviated`.

sandos 4y ago

Wow, it is fast! I could see it had my test-route drawn and ready before the scrolling animation to the start had even finished.

ygra 4y ago

A few things that I notice in the area where I'm somewhat active as an OSM contributor: - You probably shouldn't render guideposts or route markers on the map, or at least not with generic "info" icon. - Things with access=private are likely not terribly relevant to people looking at the map. This will include things like parking spots or gardens. - Lots of shots and amenities have icons, but doctors don't. Neither do fire stations. - Sports pitches are shown as nodes, but may be better shown as areas, since they often cover quite extensive swaths of ground that's otherwise empty with just an icon in the middle. Same with playgrounds, schools, and kindergartens, gardens, and parks. - For buildings and building parts, if you don't make use of the parts in any way (such as showing roofs, height, etc.) perhaps just disregard the parts and only render the building outlines. This, combined with the fact that geometries seem to be simplified, even at the highest zoom levels, results in a bit of a mess of lines at times where some outlines are simplified differently from others that should actually share parts of the same edges and thus overlap perfectly. (e.g. https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F111206435 https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F11120... or https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F111206435 https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Avenue%3Away%2F11120...). Same thing with the geometry simplification also happens with adjacent geometry that should actually not have gaps (e.g. semidetached houses or garages next to houses). Lots of buildings that are actually rectangular also get quite weird angles. - Tunnels are quite subtle. And while at least roads in tunnels don't overlap buildings that are actually above them (like with Carto) it's still hard to make out what's above and what's below in such cases (e.g. https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Astreet%3Apolyline%3A30081121 https://maps.earth/place/openstreetmap%3Astreet%3Apolyline%3...). Culverts for waterways are handled better than roads in tunnels in this case. Overall though, this seems like a quite nice map style. Closer to Google Maps in that it emphasizes roads, but some people like the less detailed look (and it works better with vector maps, I guess, to have fewer polygons to render).

ellenhp 4y ago
I'm using OSM Liberty [1] so as far as I know I should be just tracking upstream with most of these issues, but I think some of them might actually be introduced by planetiler [2]. Thanks for giving it such a detailed look though. [1] https://github.com/maputnik/osm-liberty https://github.com/maputnik/osm-liberty [2] https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/issues/324 https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/issues/324

paxvinci 4y ago

I have found an error in a street name. Where could I report it?

karussell 4y ago
On https://www.openstreetmap.org https://www.openstreetmap.org See the tutorial there or https://learnosm.org/en/beginner/start-osm/ https://learnosm.org/en/beginner/start-osm/

murphyslab 4y ago

Works surprisingly well! One note for walking directions: It doesn't seem to take elevation gain into account in choosing between alternate routes. Probably a not an easy thing to implement.

WhyNotHugo 4y ago

This is very interesting (and impressive work). I've been thinking for quite some time that it would be very useful to have a local map server for offline use. A lot of applications need to show data related to location (e.g.: a photo app might want to show a map of where a photo was taken). Having a local service to resolve these would be superb. I know this product has a different goal, but I wonder if the backend side of it could actually fill in this role. Essentially exposing location/mapping services to local applications.