OpenFreeMap provides free map hosting so you can display custom maps on your website and apps.
It is truly free: there are no limits on the number of map views or requests you can make, nor on how you use your map. There is no registration page, user database, API keys, or cookies.
It is truly open-source: everything, including the full production setup, is in this repo. Map data is from OpenStreetMap.
The goal of this project is to provide free, production-quality vector-tile hosting using existing tools.
Currently these tools are: OpenStreetMap, OpenMapTiles, Planetiler , MapLibre and Natural Earth and soon tilemaker. OFM does not want to be an alternative to any of these projects. If the community decides, we can replace any of these tools.
The scope of this repo is limited (see below). Once we figure out the technical details, ideally, there should be few commits here, while everything keeps working: the map tiles are automatically generated, servers are automatically updated and load balancing takes care of failing servers.
The styles repo, on the other hand, is continuously being developed.
Contributions are more than welcome!
The only way this project can possibly work is to be super focused about what it is and what it isn't. OFM has the following limitations by design:
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OFM is not providing:
- search or geocoding
- route calculation, navigation or directions
- static image generation
- raster tile hosting
- satellite image hosting
- elevation lookup
- custom tile or dataset hosting
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OFM is not something you can install on your dev machine. OFM is a deploy script specifically made to set up clean Ubuntu servers or virtual machines. It uses Fabric and runs commands over SSH. With a single command it can set up a production-ready OFM server, both for tile hosting and generation.
This repo is also Docker free. If someone wants to make a Docker-based version of this, I'm more than happy to link it here.
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OFM does not promise worry-free automatic updates for self-hosters. Only use the autoupdate version of http-host if you keep a close eye on this repo.
The project has the following parts
This sets up everything on a clean Ubuntu server. You run it locally and it sets up the server via SSH.
Inside http_host, all work is done by host_manager.py.
It does the following:
- checks the most up-to-date files in the public buckets
- downloads/extracts them locally, if needed
- mounts the downloaded BTRFS images in
/mnt/ofm - creates the correct TileJSON file
- creates the correct nginx config
- reloads nginx
You can run ./host_manager.py --help to see which options are available. Some commands can be run locally, including on non-linux machines.
note: Tile generation is 100% optional, as we are providing the processed full planet files for public download.
The tile_gen scripts downloads a full planet OSM extract and runs it through Planetiler (or soon tilemaker).
The created .mbtiles file is then extracted into a BTRFS partition image using the custom extract_mbtiles script. The partition is shrunk using the shrink_btrfs script.
Finally, it's uploaded to a public Cloudflare R2 bucket using rclone.
styles - styles repo
A very important part, probably needs the most work in the long term future.
See self hosting docs.
Production-quality hosting of 300 million tiny files is hard. The average file size is just 450 byte. Dozens of tile servers have been written to tackle this problem, but they all have their limitations.
The original idea of this project is to avoid using tile servers altogether. Instead, the tiles are directly served from BTRFS partition images + hard links using an optimised nginx config. I wrote extract_mbtiles and shrink_btrfs scripts for this very purpose.
This replaces a running service with a pure, file-system-level implementation. Since the Linux kernel's file caching is among the highest-performing and most thoroughly tested codes ever written, it delivers serious performance.
I run some benchmarks on a Hetzner server, the aim was to saturate a gigabit connection. At the end, it was able to serve 30 Gbit on localhost, on a cold nginx cache.
You can directly download the processed full planet runs on the following URLs:
https://planet.openfreemap.com/20231221_134737_pt/tiles.mbtiles // 84 GB, mbtiles file https://planet.openfreemap.com/20231221_134737_pt/tiles.btrfs.gz // 81 GB, BTRFS partition image
Replace the 20231221_134737_pt part with any newer run, from the index file.
There are three public buckets:
- https://assets.openfreemap.com - contains fonts, sprites, styles, versions. index: dirs, files
- https://planet.openfreemap.com - full planet runs. index: dirs, files
- https://monaco.openfreemap.com - identical runs to the full planet, but only for Monaco area. Very tiny, ideal for development. index: dirs, files
The project has two domains: .org and .com. Currently, both are on Cloudflare.
The general public only interacts with the .org domain. It has been designed so that this domain can be migrated away from Cloudflare if needed.
The .com domain hosts the R2 buckets, which are required to be on Cloudflare. This domain will always remain on CF.
I would have loved to use PMTiles; they are a brilliant idea!
Unfortunately, making range requests in 80 GB files just doesn't work in production. It is fine for files smaller than 500 MB, but it has terrible latency and caching issues for full planet datasets.
If PMTiles implements splitting to <10 MB files, it can be a valid alternative to running servers.
Contributors welcome!
Smaller tasks:
- Add tilemaker, so we see the difference between planetiler and tilemaker and they can both validate their output based on this comparison.
- Round Robin load balancer
- Cloudflare worker for indexing the public buckets, instead of generating index.txt files.
- Some of the POI icons are missing in the styles.
Bigger tasks:
- Split the styles to blocks and build them up from blocks. For example, there should be a POI block, a label block, a road-style related block.
- Implement automatic updates for tile gen, uploading, testing and setting versions.
Tasks outside the scope of this project:
- Make a successor for the OpenMapTiles schema.
- Docker image for running this self-hosted on any machine.
See dev setup docs.
v0.1 - everything works. 1 server for tile gen, 2 servers for HTTP host. <- we are here!
Attribution is required. If you are using MapLibre, they are automatically added, you have nothing to do.
If you are using alternative clients, or if you are using this in printed media or video, you must add the following attribution:
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap
You do not need to display the OpenFreeMap part, but it is nice if you do.
The license of this project is MIT. Map data is from OpenStreetMap. The licenses for included projects are listed in LICENSE.md.