I’m surprised nobody has mentioned tiles here. In order for anyone to build products around OSM data you’re probably going to want to render a map. Tile hosting services are costly and I have up last time I tried to find out how you could do it yourself.
Very good job with this. I am working on a similar project and I was wondering if you are planning on hosting your own OSM tiles or using a service (Mapbox is listed, but are you going with that?) ?
Thanks!
Hey, great work! I'm currently working a mapping project, with smallish, customized maps. I'm wondering about your strategy for map tiling? Did OSM do it/provide an easy for you to tile the maps/download the tiles? Basically I'm looking for some software that will help me turn my own images into map tiles. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
Really interesting project/product! It's really nice to see new ways of rendering OSM data, and alternative map services.
I am developing another way to run your own map server (without mapnik!) from a low-end computer (https://github.com/jamesrr39/ownmap-app in case you're interested), but a little bit different to you in that I'm currently focusing on rendering raster tiles. I'm really happy I saw this thread, however, I hadn't heard of the OSM Express, MBTiles or PMTiles formats before and was/am rolling my own format, so it's really interesting looking at some ideas from these.
That is usually out of the question, because raster tiles don't allow you to customize the map (colors, which features to display at which zoom levels, etc). I find openstreetmap way too busy as a backdrop for data.
As I've said, the solutions are there, and there is an actual demand for cheap vector tile hosting without all of the other cruft that is bundled in the commercial solutions but isn't actually needed.
I think there's a decent gap where it doesn't make sense economically to download and run your own OSM tile server. Especially if you need worldwide coverage, the costs of keeping a tile server with a full dataset running plus a redundant spare can easily exceed the cost of paying someone a couple hundred dollars per month to do it for you.
There are hardly any services like what MapBox and CloudMade have. The closest seem to be the various consultancies that will design and host a map for you.
It's not hard to produce your own tiles from OpenStreetMap data and serve them from your own server using something as Leaflet. If you only need to show maps, and if OSM data is good enough in your part of the world (a big if), this is the way to go.
What is very hard is coming up for a replacement of either geocoding/reverse geocoding, or routing; many solutions exist but most don't really work or are quite difficult to setup (IMHO).
Your own personal map tile server? That's interesting... what are you planning to achieve that you can't just get from openstreetmap.org? Will you run an instance of graphhopper or project-osm alongside?
OSM is really a dataset. They do offer a raster tile server, but it's intended to support community mapping (improving the dataset), and not necessarily for end users using a map for other purposes.
Basically they want you to host your own tile server using the OSM dataset. There are also commercial offerings that do this for you, but not for free.
If you want some of the features you mention rendered in your application you probably have to "Generate your own vector tiles from selected OpenStreetMap tags" as they also mention on their website.
[1] I'm not even a customer of them, just browsing their website.
As ever, worth noting that self-hosting maps can be a very viable option.
You can generate OSM-derived vector tiles for the whole world for €15, using tilemaker running on Scaleway bare metal. It'd cost more like ~€100 to run it on AWS but still very doable.
That gives you a big sqlite database file (.mbtiles) to host wherever you want. Use Maplibre, the open-source fork of Mapbox GL, in your app or site.
Thank you! It's on my todo-list to set up such a server and your work will really help with it.
Here is another excellent write-up from Stefan Erhardt who is the founder of OpenTopoMap [0][1] which gives step-by-step instructions [2] on how to set up a tile server with custom tile rendering, also based on OSM's data.
Super excited for your project. I have been using map tiles from Mapbox, MapTiler, OSM Buildings for my project and am coming to the point that I need to merge elevation data with building height data in order to cast realistic shadows across the earth. Unfortunately elevation data and building data come from two different tile sets from two different tile providers and it's a lot of download/processing overhead to merge the two data sources. I need to make my own tiles!
I spent part of today on the OSM wiki trying to wrap my head around Mapnik, how tiles are generated, how I am going to host this cheaply because my project is non-commercial, and then the HN gods smiled on me. Thank you for taking this on and I'm coming along for this journey!
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