osm-liberty-topo VS headway

Most of these examples go up to zoom 10 or so because they cover a wide area. It's not prohibitive to increase that zoom in a small area because the total number of tiles will still be low. Also keep in mind that for vector data it's possible to "overzoom" and allow the client zoom levels to be higher than the physical data levels.

In terms of self hosted maps for outdoors use, I have some open source repos from a few years ago that may help with that. [0] is a style based on the openmaptiles vector tile schema for outdoors purposes. I believe that readme has some overall instructions, plus other repos in the org are for making data. (Nowadays planetiler is probably the best way to make OSM vector tiles though)

[0]: https://github.com/nst-guide/osm-liberty-topo

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