DAdabreegster·Jan 3, 2026
Quite cool to see this space being explored! https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway is another related project.
In Show HN: Offline tiles and routing and geocoding in one Docker Compose stackheadwaymaps
headway
Rust2022–2026
headwaymaps / headway
headway
Self-hostable maps stack, powered by OpenStreetMap.
8Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Self-hostable maps stack, powered by OpenStreetMap.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year17 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2022-08-11 04:14:12 UTC to 2026-01-03 18:45:53 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 2 | 7 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
17 sourcesOne tricky thing about maps, as they relate to privacy, is that the earth is large.
Compare that to encrypted email: if I’m sending you an encrypted message, the total data involved is minimal. To a first approximation, it’s just the message contents.
But if I want “Google Maps but private,” I first need access to an entire globe’s worth of data, on the order of terabytes. That’s a lot of storage for your (usually mobile) client, and a lot of bandwidth for whoever delivers it. And that data needs to be refreshed over time.
Typical mapping applications (like Google Maps) solve this with a combination of network services that answer your questions remotely (“Tell me what you’re searching for, and I’ll tell you where it is.”) and by tiling data so your client can request exactly what it needs, and no more, which is also a tell.
The privacy f
Read the rest
ocused options I see are:
1. Pre-download all the map data, like OrganicMaps [1], to perform your calculations on the device. From a privacy perspective, you reveal only a coarse-grained notion of the area you’re interested in. As a "bonus", you get an offline maps app. You need to know a priori what areas you’ll need. For directions, that's usually fine, because I’m usually looking at local places, but sometimes I want to explore a random spot around the globe. Real-time transit and traffic-adaptive routing remain unaddressed.
2. Self-host your own mapping stack, as with Headway (I work on Headway). For the reasons above, it’s harder than hosting your own wiki, but I think it’s doable. It doesn’t currently support storing personal data (where you’ve been, favorite places, etc.), but adding that in a privacy conscious way isn’t unfathomable.
[1] https://organicmaps.app (though there are others)
[2] https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway (see a hosted demo at https://maps.earth)
Over the last few weeks I’ve been hard at work building a FOSS maps app for Android from the ground up based on Material 3 components and industry standard maps tooling. It has online and offline modes, and integrates well with self-hosted maps services like Headway[0] deployments. I’m really quite pleased with it and I hope others enjoy using it as much as I’ve enjoyed making it. I’m about 2 weeks in to development so expect some bugs. But it has most of the features you’d expect like search, directions and navigation. It’s shockingly usable already.
I’ve been yearning for something better in the FOSS maps space for a long time. I don’t think I’m the only one. I’m really hopeful that Cardinal Maps can grow into that something for myself and others.
If you’re stoked about this project I’d appreciate contributions and beta testers. There’s
Read the rest
an obtainium link in the repo README.md if you want updates. :)
[0] https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway
Nice, thanks for sharing!
https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway also worth checking out.
In Show HN: ServerlessMaps – Host your own maps in the cloudIn a similar vein: https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway
In How to make self-hosted maps that work everywhere and cost next to nothingAlso worth to keep an eye on: https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/
In Organic Maps: An open-source maps app that doesn't suckYou might want to peek at https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway . I have never used it myself, but it at least shows how to integrate the different pieces.
The individual software components often have alternative with a similar scope. So if you don't like a choice headwaymaps made, browse around.
The data sources are mostly "unique", i.e. everybody downloads from the pages (Geofabrik, Who's On First, etc), so not much to gain here.
Editing styles has some alternatives, but the OpenSource editors are far away from the quality of the Mapbox editor. Maputnik or editing the 1000+ SLOC JSON by hand are the way to go, imo.
Personally I use GeoFabrik to download OSM extracts → osmconvert to extract the smaller bounding box I am interested in → tilemaker to render vector tiles to individual .pbf files I can serve like it's 1999. The bounding b
Read the rest
ox extract is not necessary, but it's much faster if you need to tweak things in tilemaker. Both tilemaker and osmconvert are packaged for at least Debian out of the box, so setup is easy enough. Rendering a decently sized metro area takes < 30mins with this from scratch of compute, < 5min with the bounding box extract.
Note that adding icons (sprites) or fonts is extra work that comes on top. And while the tools themselves are great, there's still a lot of gluing/plumbing/fitting things together that you'll need to do. If headwaymaps works for you, it's probably the easiest choice.
Headway (https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway), a free and open mapping platform, has some new functionality to enable transit directions on planet scale instances. maps.earth is our planet scale demonstration site.
I posted here both to advertise the new feature for people who might interested in using it, but also in hopes of getting feedback on the approach from people who are familiar with the space.
In Adding Transit Directions to Maps.earthIn a similar vain, there is maps.earth / headway. Aiming to be easy to self-host and very open to contributions.
https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway
https://about.maps.earth/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551273
In Self Hosting a Google Maps Alternative with OpenStreetMapSelf-hostable maps stack, powered by OpenStreetMap
233 points · Open discussionRelated concept (recently submitted to HN) https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway
In Host your own OpenStreetMap Map TilesI 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
In Maps.earth – free and open-source web mapsIt'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
In Maps.earth – free and open-source web mapsThis 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.
In Maps.earth – free and open-source web mapsOK, 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
In Maps.earth – free and open-source web mapsShowing the 15 most recent of 17 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.