Hey #OpenStreetMap bubble: What are my options for self-hosting a minimalistic (forward) geocoder?
I'm using #Protomaps and I enjoy not having to run a big Postgres server and associated tooling to get a nice map, but now I'd like to allow my users to find the coordinates for addresses by searching in a simple text field.
https://protomaps.com/ and PMTiles are brilliant - you can serve up a vector tile file of the entire world (100+GB) and have it display in browsers using HTTP Range header tricks to download just the subset needed for the current area
I figured out how to create a subset tile file for Half Moon Bay (just 2MB) and serve it using maplibre-gl
#Protomaps, a way to serve vector #maps of the entire world using a single static file and HTTP range requests.
It’s basically a static site generator for interactive maps. Tile servers are pretty much obsolete now. No database needed, you can run your interactive, smooth-zooming vector map from any HTTP storage. S3, Caddy running on your Wi-Fi router, even GitHub pages.
#Protomaps looks cool, but they also fail to show how to use it. Their maplibre example page starts with JSON object, and no instructions where should I paste that?
But guess what, it's collection of blue polygons? To figure out how to make it show something useful I have to figure out next thing, the layers. Of course in there is no example with sensible defaults, just blue polygons.