mod_mbtiles VS headway

Here's a little bit of code I wrote that lets you host from a normal webserver, where that "normal webserver" is Apache: https://github.com/systemed/mod_mbtiles

This is great. Servers have been the weak link in the open mbtiles stack for a good while and an out-of-the-box recipe like this will make a real difference.

(For those running on bare metal, I knocked this up a few months ago - https://github.com/systemed/mod_mbtiles - which is an Apache module that does pretty much the same thing.)

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