Self-hosting maps on my laptop

December 14, 2021 [Programming]

As part of my research for working on location sharing for Element Web, the Matrix-based instant messenger, I have been learning about tile servers.

I managed to get OSM tile server stack working on my laptop:

Video of a map zooming in and out with network requests fetching lots of PNG files.

Here are a couple useful pages I read during my research:

Switch2OSM - The Basics - explanation of some of the concepts in a way I could understand.
Switch2OSM - serving tiles using a Docker container - good explanation of how to do what I write up below.
openstreetmap-tile-server README - much more detail than this blog post.
Location Guard Firefox Plugin - allows setting a hard-coded location instead of sharing your real location.
Implementing Vector Tile Support in Libshumate - explanation of the ideas from James Westman

Today I managed to run a real tile server on my laptop, using data downloaded from OpenStreetMap in a way that I think complies with their terms of use.

To run these commands you will need Docker, and hopefully nothing much else.

Download the data

I downloaded the UK data like this:

wget 'https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/great-britain-latest.osm.pbf'

You can find downloads for other regions at download.geofabrik.de/

Import it

Then I ran an import, which converts the PBF data into tiles that can be shown in a UI:

docker volume create openstreetmap-data
docker volume create openstreetmap-rendered-tiles
docker run \
    -v $PWD/great-britain-latest.osm.pbf:/data.osm.pbf \
    -v openstreetmap-data:/var/lib/postgresql/12/main \
    -v openstreetmap-rendered-tiles:/var/lib/mod_tile \
    -e THREADS=24 \
    overv/openstreetmap-tile-server:1.3.10 \
    import

(Change "great-britain" to match what you downloaded.)

On my quite powerful laptop this took 39 minutes to run.

Run the tile server

Finally, I launched the server:

(Make sure you've done the "Import it" step first.)

docker run \
    -p 8080:80 \
    -v openstreetmap-data:/var/lib/postgresql/12/main \
    -v openstreetmap-rendered-tiles:/var/lib/mod_tile \
    -e THREADS=24 \
    -e ALLOW_CORS=enabled \
    -d overv/openstreetmap-tile-server:1.3.10 \
    run

This should launch the docker container in the background, which you can check with docker ps.

Test it

You can now grab a single file by going to http://127.0.0.1:8080/tile/0/0/0.png, or interact with the map properly at http://127.0.0.1:8080.

It was quite unresponsive at first, but once it had cached the tiles I was looking at, it was very smooth.