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Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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 :)

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.

Thank you for the feedback :)

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'))

Using tile.openstreetmap.org is subject to the OSM tile usage policy: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy

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.

If you are building your own tileserver then you take one of the OSM dumps for your area.

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.

Note that the {s} part is for backwards compatibility, and that https://tile.openstreetmap.org is enough, or maybe even a tiny bit faster, now that we have http 2.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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 :)

could you put up munim or other similar metrics site for public? it would be nice to see such a high load

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.

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. :/

What problems did you face with cycling directions?

Regarding the route shapes I can only guess: we use an encoded polyline as default for a very compact response. You can either disable this or use our JavaScript library, or there is a new UI https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper-maps

Regarding routing parameters: our custom_model approach is more powerful than simple parameters and still not complicated: https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2020/05/31/examples-for-cus... See e.g. the several bike examples and see how to get an world wide instance up and running: https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2022/06/27/host-your-own-wo...

In recent master you can additionally control how elevation influences your route (e.g. prefer or avoid them entirely or steep sections or similar)

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