tilekiln VS headway

Tiles, vector or raster, to be consumed for general use are not really in the scope of the OpenStreetMap project. This is surprising to many because it's the first thing you see on OSM.org; the tiles there are for the explicit purpose of feedback to data editors, and make a best-effort to synchronize the instantaneous state of the database in the tiles, unlike Protomaps which delivers a snapshot.

Paul Norman has a project called Tilekiln to adapt vector rendering for this use case on OSM.org: https://github.com/pnorman/tilekiln

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