[HN Gopher] Maps.earth - free and open-source web maps
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Maps.earth - free and open-source web maps
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/ [2]
https://about.maps.earth/ [3]
https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway [4]
https://matrix.to/#/#headway:matrix.org
Author : ellenhp
Score : 439 points
Date : 2022-08-22 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.maps.earth)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.maps.earth)
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| A usable example would make this much more effective
| brochureware.
| oynqr wrote:
| Like https://maps.earth ?
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| Huh - rendered a totally different page on my desktop
| abetusk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :)
| abetusk wrote:
| There are services hosting OSM data, often times requiring
| paid API access for anything other than personal use.
|
| OSM is amazing, for sure, but standing up even a small OSM
| service that only services a map in your local
| town/city/community is too daunting for most people (myself
| included).
|
| Considering there are many other comments in this thread that
| mirror my main question, I would try and figure out
| messaging. Is it a particular tile rendering on top of OSM
| data? Is it trip heading information? Is it helping people
| stand up self hosted OSM servers? Is it helping with just a
| few components of that process? If so, which components? etc.
|
| It's hard to know what the "value add" is here and a lot of
| this is my own ignorance on how the OSM ecosystem works but
| that's kind of what I would recommend trying to convey to
| people.
|
| I wouldn't assume deep familiarity with OSM. I would like to
| hear more, especially concerning tools to help stand up a
| self hosted OSM server more easily, as I would suspect many
| other people would, but it would be nice to have some basics
| spelled out instead of assuming I have deep familiarity with
| the sprawling and intricate OSM ecosystem.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > tools to help stand up a self hosted OSM server more
| easily
|
| I think that's already the wrong way to think about it. For
| some reason that I do not comprehend, OSM comprises at
| least 3 different file formats, and 5 or 6 different ways
| to store that data.
|
| When you 'set up an OSM server', what you really do is pick
| one of the storage methods, and then import the data with
| one of a variety of tools that were built over the years
| (and are probably compatible with only one or two of the
| storage methods each).
|
| Seriously, the OSM ecosystem is a clusterfuck. Anyone that
| aims to standardize it into something easy to deploy has my
| full support.
| chess_buster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thank you for the feedback :)
| stevage wrote:
| I built something along the same lines many years ago, with
| routing but not geocoding.
|
| https://github.com/stevage/saltymill
|
| Yeah, it's a pain in the arse getting all the bits together.
| And I wasn't attempting full planet scale.
| soheil wrote:
| 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.opens
| treetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png'))
| simon04 wrote:
| Using tile.openstreetmap.org is subject to the OSM tile
| usage policy:
| https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy
| soheil wrote:
| Their data is also subject to this policy:
| https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_License
|
| They also heavily discourage bulk downloading tiles so
| I'm not sure if you're that much better off building your
| own tile server.
| Aeolun wrote:
| If you are building your own tileserver then you take one
| of the OSM dumps for your area.
| ellenhp wrote:
| To add onto this, those are raster tiles and the industry
| is moving away from raster tiles for a multitude of
| reasons. Headway doesn't bulk-download tiles from OSM, by
| default it takes an OSM extract from BBBike (with
| explicit permission) and brings up a server based on
| that. It generates vector tiles with planetiler and
| serves them with tileserver-gl-light. I've put a lot of
| thought into the way it all works in an effort to
| minimize load on the OSM ecosystem's infrastructure,
| provide attribution where required, etc.
|
| I can promise you that there's no one-line replacement
| for the work I've done here unless you want to go out and
| pay for a closed-source product.
| abetusk wrote:
| OK, the GitHub page spells it out better [0].
|
| > Self-hostable maps stack, powered by OpenStreetMap.
|
| In addition to listing out some of the required specs (for a
| localized area) [1]:
|
| > ... generation ... needs ... 8GB of memory ... running ...
| around 4GB ...
|
| > ... recommend ... 50GB ... disk space
|
| [0] https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway
|
| [1] https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway#system-requirements
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| could we.... uh, have our server for a specific city or town
| for example if the use case is around that area only? that
| would save a lot of resources
| ellenhp wrote:
| Yup! That's how most people run Headway right now. You can
| probably get by with around 2GB of RAM for a medium-sized
| metro, possibly even less.
|
| Also for full-planet requirements, the OVH box running
| maps.earth has 64GB of RAM and 6 physical cores and is
| really struggling right now. Load average is about 40, most
| its CPU time is spent on the Valhalla service. Really
| enjoying watching the metrics right now :)
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| could you put up munim or other similar metrics site for
| public? it would be nice to see such a high load
| zylepe wrote:
| You may have chosen Valhalla for other reasons, but FWIW
| I've found Graphhopper can handle 1-2 orders of magnitude
| more qps than Valhalla on the same hardware.
| ellenhp wrote:
| I wasn't happy with cycling directions in GraphHopper and
| I was having trouble getting route shapes from its
| routing endpoint which made it really difficult to plot
| route polylines on the map. I've also been looking
| forward to exposing some customization of routing
| parameters since valhalla allows you to do this fairly
| trivially. That is good to know, though. Valhalla really
| is getting hammered by all this traffic. :/
| playingalong wrote:
| I like the fact it uses Earthly for building. Nice pun.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Link to the previous post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31536217
|
| Congrats on all the progress in 3 months!
| codethief wrote:
| 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).
| sorenjan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jonas-w wrote:
| Thanks for Organic Maps!
|
| The website doesn't seem to work for me either on mobile.
| vanous wrote:
| This is amazing, thank you very much! It is really tempting to
| spin up a small instance for hyper local maps.
| ellenhp wrote:
| 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/ and the search results are more
| relevant too. My own personal instance for Seattle has largely
| replaced Google Maps for me. :)
| DonnyV wrote:
| Didn't have my address in NJ.
| tuukkah wrote:
| You should be able to add it at https://openstreetmap.org :-)
| jmkb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Have you explored whether it would be possible to upload
| only the changed parts?
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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.
| sorenjan wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| I tried the hosted app at https://maps.earth but it isn't really
| usable at present. How do you actually search for and navigate to
| places?
| ellenhp wrote:
| 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%2F12903...
|
| [2]
| https://maps.earth/directions/bicycle/openstreetmap%3Avenue%...
| paxys wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not working for me either. No results show up, even for
| common places like LA.
| ellenhp wrote:
| 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.
| juliansimioni wrote:
| Hi! Maintainer of Pelias here and co-founder of Geocode
| Earth where we continue to fund Pelias development
| through our SaaS and consulting.
|
| You need to bring Who's on First data in to support
| administrative areas, it won't use admin areas from OSM.
| This is a bit of a technical choice (WOF has some nice
| features like stable IDs and a rich hierarchy, and a data
| format that's much easier to work with), but also the
| result of the Who's on First project and Pelias being
| developed together while we were at Mapzen.
|
| Don't hesitate to reach out to us if you need help
| getting things set up.
| ellenhp wrote:
| Is there a contact point you'd prefer me to use for
| reaching out? I'm pretty sure I'm using WOF for bringing
| up Pelias but it's entirely possible I'm configuring
| things wrong. I'm also having a lot of trouble getting
| good performance out of the viewport biasing on the
| autocomplete endpoint (`focus.point`). Photon has
| `location_bias_scale` which allowed me to do very strong
| viewport biasing for zoomed-in queries and eliminate it
| almost entirely when zoomed out.
|
| Is this something that could be added? I don't mind doing
| a bit of legwork if need be. This is important enough
| that I'm willing to throw a few weeks at implementing it.
|
| The pelias.json for this instance is at: https://publicda
| ta.ellenhp.workers.dev/planet-v1.16.pelias.j...
|
| I'll go double check that the placeholder container is
| operating correctly, actually. :)
| joekrill wrote:
| 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.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| How much resources does something like this use? (full planet,
| few (<10) users)? Disk, RAM, cpu cores?
| ellenhp wrote:
| 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
| koinedad wrote:
| Love the idea of freeing up map data
| shafyy wrote:
| 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/
| jutaz wrote:
| 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
| bearjaws wrote:
| We're in the same boat using Mapbox, we've been debating
| leaving for the OpenStreetMaps container since we only use them
| for static images and map display.
| https://github.com/Overv/openstreetmap-tile-server
|
| Our bill last year was $80k and honestly its right on the cusp
| of being worth the effort to switch.
| lambda_dn wrote:
| ElCheapo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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]
| ElCheapo wrote:
| Forget that, I erroneously asked for walking directions my
| bad. Shame I can't delete the comment lol
| soheil wrote:
| Can you tell us what this even is before telling us how sorry you
| are that it's not perfect?
| ellenhp wrote:
| It's a self-hostable web maps stack trying to be an open-source
| alternative to Google Maps.
| [deleted]
| antman wrote:
| Is it a web app? A web service?
| lkbm wrote:
| You can use it as a web service by visiting https://maps.earth/
| alexalx666 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I can also imagine requesting route via terminal and getting
| just list of directions which is many times enough
| tuukkah wrote:
| 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.
| fsflover wrote:
| Time to upgrade to Librem 5 ;)
| c0nsumer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is tracked here:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks for pointing me there. I'll give it a read and see
| what I might be able to do.
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