3N3np·Sep 21, 2023
Also worth to keep an eye on: https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway/
In Organic Maps: An open-source maps app that doesn't suckheadwaymaps
headway
Rust2022–2026
headwaymaps / headway
headway
Self-hostable maps stack, powered by OpenStreetMap.
8Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3KGitHub stars
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Self-hostable maps stack, powered by OpenStreetMap.
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:49:33 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year17 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2022-08-11 04:14:12 UTC to 2026-01-03 18:45:53 UTC.
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| 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
3 sourcesYou 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.earth