photon VS headway

Photon by Komoot is also using Elasticsearch for validating addresses and locations.

Alternatively, you could run your own Photon API: https://github.com/komoot/photon

Open Source. The routing server is open source too and geocoding too.

To fully self-host a route planner (e.g. a "Google Maps" equivalent) you need GraphHopper for the routing and two other parts: you also need some visualization aka "maps" (e.g. with OpenMapTiles) and you need the address search (e.g. with Photon).

There exists photon, but I don't know if it's used in any libre mapping app.

Acastus-Photon is an Android app that allows you to search up any address or point of interest on OpenStreetMaps and open it in OsmAnd or any other maps app. It relies on photon as it's open-source backend server (provides elasticsearch for OSM), so you can either use a public instance or self-host. This allows you to have search functionality as powerful as Google Maps whilst being able to use solely open-source software instead.

You 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 box 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.

In a similar vain, there is maps.earth / headway:

https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway

https://about.maps.earth/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551273

Another self hostable OSM stack that seems promising is headway

About: https://about.maps.earth/

Something like this? https://github.com/headwaymaps/headway