🗺️ OSM - self host the entire planet 🌎 in ~30 minutes 🚀
simple mbtiles server
What komoot/outdooractive do better: they have real difficulty data (sac_scale from raw OSM data, curated routes, community feedback, up-to-date closure notices). Our router sends you over the Stopselzieher without a word — they don't.
simple mbtiles server
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เครื่องมือ
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อัปไทม์
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When it comes to pure routing, they're clearly ahead of us.
What we have and they don't:
Agent-native. "Plan me a 3-day tour with hut stays, check the opening hours" is an afternoon of clicking on komoot — here it's one sentence. They have no MCP interface and won't build one anytime soon; their business model is keeping you inside their app.
Composability. geocode → poi → route → gpx → nextcloud are building blocks the agent chains freely and enriches with web research. Over there it's a monolith.
Self-hosted, offline, no paywall. The komoot world pack costs money, so does outdooractive pro, and both phone home.
Transparency. When our router screws up, I can measure why. Their black box you can only doubt.
We didn't build the better router — we built the better interface for LLM agents. A dumb-but-honest router + an agent that fills the gaps via web search + GPX export: that's the real lever.
— Fable 5.1, Sept 2026
Fact check: sac_scale was in the OSM data all along — planetiler just filtered it out. And komoot/outdooractive happily route you over the via ferrata at the Kreuzspitze towards the Hochvogel, even in "mountain hiking" mode. Ours asks for your SAC comfort level before routing and keeps you off the Stopselzieher.
Just set -e PHOTONSERVER="https://photon.osuv.de" for your sms Container.
This also enables the geocode and reverse_geocode MCP tools; without it
they are not registered at all.
Two consumers, possibly two URLs
PHOTONSERVER is substituted into index.html at startup, so the browser
talks to Photon directly with that URL — it has to be publicly reachable.
The MCP tools, on the other hand, call Photon from inside the container.
If both run in podman/docker, the public hostname often resolves to a LAN
address the container network cannot route to (split-horizon DNS), and you get
Connection refused. Changing PHOTONSERVER is not the fix: that would break
the frontend.
Use PHOTONSERVER_INTERNAL for the server-side path instead:
podman network create osm
podman run -d --rm --network osm --name photon \
-e UPDATE_STRATEGY=DISABLED \
-p 8888:2322 \
-v /home/m/osm/photon/:/photon/data \
docker.io/rtuszik/photon-docker:2.1.1
podman run -ti --rm --network osm --name sms \
-p 9000:9000 \
-e PHOTONSERVER="https://photon.osuv.de" \
-e PHOTONSERVER_INTERNAL="http://photon:2322" \
-v /home/m/osm/sms/:/data/ \
localhost/sms:dev
If PHOTONSERVER_INTERNAL is unset, server-side calls fall back to
PHOTONSERVER, which is the right thing when both are reachable from
everywhere (single host, no container network in between).
Configuration
Tilesets are configured through numbered environment variable groups
(MBTILES__1__*, MBTILES__2__*, …):
Variable
Required
Description
PORT
yes
Listen port
MBTILES__n__URL
yes
Path to the .mbtiles file
MBTILES__n__IDENTIFIER
yes
Tileset name used in URLs
MBTILES__n__VERSION
yes
Tileset version used in URLs
MBTILES__n__MIN_ZOOM
yes
Minimum zoom level
MBTILES__n__MAX_ZOOM
yes
Maximum zoom level
HTTP_ACCESS_CONTROL_ALLOW_ORIGIN
no
CORS header value
PHOTONSERVER
no
Public Photon base URL; enables geocoding and is embedded into the map UI
PHOTONSERVER_INTERNAL
no
Photon URL used for server-side calls (MCP tools) when the public one is not reachable from inside the container
TILE_CACHE_SIZE
no
Decoded road tiles kept in memory (default 2000; contour and POI caches get a quarter of that each)
ROUTE_MAX_TILES
no
Corridor tile limit per segment (default 1200)
ROUTE_MAX_CROW_KM
no
Straight-line limit per segment in km (default 50)
GPX_DIR
no
Where generated GPX files are stored (default $TMPDIR/sms-gpx)
GPX_MAX_FILES
no
Keep at most this many GPX files (default 200)
GPX_TTL_SECONDS
no
Delete GPX files older than this (default 86400)
GPX_MAX_UPLOAD_BYTES
no
Size limit for POST /v1/gpx uploads (default 10 MiB)
HELP WANTED
Improve Style
special for Nextcloud GxpPod
provide more style? remove some?
planet.mbtiles
My provided planet.mbtiles is generated by using
https://github.com/markuman/planetiler — a fork of
planetiler following its
PLANET.md
tutorial, with one difference: the OpenMapTiles profile is extended to emit
outdoor attributes at z14 that the upstream schema drops.
poi: cave entrances, springs, wells, water taps, bivouac huts, saddles,
summits, emergency phones, mountain rescue
Without those, sms still works — it simply has no difficulty data to route on
or warn about, and the drinking_water/cave/viewpoint/emergency POI
categories stay empty. /v1/capabilities reports which attributes the loaded
tiles actually carry under difficulty_data.
contours.mbtiles
Contours will be displayed if a file called contours.mbtiles is places next to planet.mbtiles.
There are two different contours files provided. 90m resolution in Zoom Level 11 to 14 and 90m resolution in Zoom Level 11 to 13 with 30m resolution in Zoom Level 14.
contours — whether contours.mbtiles was detected and loaded
routing — always true; indicates the /v1/route/ endpoint is available
mcp — the MCP endpoint at POST /mcp is available
gpx — GPX export is available
geocoding — whether PHOTONSERVER is configured (enables the geocode
and reverse_geocode MCP tools)
mcp_tools — names of the registered MCP tools
difficulty_data — which hiking attributes the loaded tiles actually carry.
All false on stock OpenMapTiles tiles (see Hiking attributes below), and
in that case a missing warning means missing data, not easy terrain. The
flags flip to true as soon as a tile containing them has been decoded.
sac_scale_values — accepted values for max_sac_scale, easiest first
tile_cache — live hit/miss counters of the decoded-tile caches
GET /v1/poi/{identifier}@{version}?lat={lat}&lon={lon}&category={category}&radius={radius}
Search for Points of Interest (POI) within a radius and return GeoJSON features.
Path Parameters:
identifier — Tileset identifier
version — Tileset version
Query Parameters:
lat — Latitude coordinate (required)
lon — Longitude coordinate (required)
category — POI category (required): supermarket, pharmacy, hospital,
fuel, charging_station, alpine_hut, camp_site, shelter,
drinking_water, cave, viewpoint, or emergency
drinking_water, cave, viewpoint and emergency need tiles built with
the extended profile linked above — stock OpenMapTiles does not put springs,
wells or cave entrances into the poi layer at all. Note that
drinking_water includes springs and cattle troughs: that is a location, not
a potability guarantee.
Note that alpine_hut covers only real mountain huts
(alpine_hut, wilderness_hut, basic_hut). OpenMapTiles files bus stop
shelters and public air-raid shelters under subclass=shelter, which around
Garmisch is 113 of 122 hits and mostly unnamed — those live in the separate
shelter category so they cannot bury the actual huts.
radius — Search radius in km, default 15, max 50 (optional)
Response: GeoJSON FeatureCollection of POIs, each with a
properties.distance_km. Sorted by distance, but named POIs come first
within the same ~500 m band — an unnamed hut slightly closer is less useful
than a named one you can look up.
GET /v1/tiles/{identifier}@{version}/{z}/{x}/{y}.mvt
Fetch a tile in Mapbox Vector Tile (MVT) format.
Path Parameters:
identifier — Tileset identifier (e.g., from MBTILES__1__IDENTIFIER)
version — Tileset version (e.g., from MBTILES__1__VERSION)
z — Zoom level
x — Tile column coordinate
y — Tile row coordinate (converts from Web Mercator to TMS)
Special:[email protected] is auto-loaded if contours.mbtiles exists.
Gzip Negotiation: Returns gzip-compressed tiles if client sends Accept-Encoding: gzip.
Caching:max-age=604800 plus an ETag that changes when the .mbtiles
file is rebuilt — see Caching. Send If-None-Match to get a
cheap 304.
Returns the sprite image (2x resolution for retina displays).
Path Parameters:
identifier — Style identifier
version — Style version
Response:image/png
GET /v1/fonts/{identifier}@{version}/{stack}/{range}.pbf
Returns merged glyph data in Protocol Buffer format for font rendering.
Path Parameters:
identifier — Font identifier (fonts-gl)
version — Font version (1.0.0)
stack — Comma-separated font stack (max 4 fonts, e.g., Noto Sans Regular,Noto Sans Bold)
range — Glyph range (e.g., 0-255)
Response:application/vnd.google.protobuf
Gzip-compressed if client sends Accept-Encoding: gzip
Merges glyphs from all fonts in stack, deduplicating by glyph ID
GET /v1/route/{identifier}@{version}?from={lat},{lon}&to={lat},{lon}&profile={profile}
Compute a walking or cycling route between two coordinates using the vector tile road network.
No external routing engine required — routing is performed entirely server-side from the MBTiles data.
Path Parameters:
identifier — Tileset identifier (same as used for /v1/tiles/)
version — Tileset version
Query Parameters:
from — Start point as lat,lon (required)
to — End point as lat,lon (required)
profile — Routing profile: foot (default) or bike
buffer_km — Corridor half-width around the straight line (optional).
Defaults to 10 % of the segment length, at least ~3.3 km. Raise it when a
detour around a lake or a closed area is needed.
elevation — true to add ascent_m/descent_m from contours.mbtiles
and switch the duration estimate to DIN 33466 (optional)
max_sac_scale — hardest SAC grade allowed: hiking (T1),
mountain_hiking (T2), demanding_mountain_hiking (T3), alpine_hiking
(T4), demanding_alpine_hiking (T5), difficult_alpine_hiking (T6).
Ways tagged above the limit are excluded from routing. Requires tiles with
hiking attributes (optional)
allow_via_ferrata — false excludes ways tagged as via ferrata or with
fixed ladders (optional, default true)
prefer_routes — true prefers ways carrying a marked hiking route
(iwn/nwn/rwn/lwn), or a cycle route for profile=bike (optional)
follow_route — follow one named route, e.g. Malerweg or the ref E3
(optional)
Note these are independent axes: a way can be T6 scrambling without any
ferrata tag, and a cabled route can be tagged T2. On a real Zugspitze test,
excluding ferratas alone still produced a T6 route — for a safe tour set
both. The response says so via terrain_warnings when only one is used.
Example:
GET /v1/route/[email protected]?from=48.137,11.575&to=48.155,11.602&profile=foot
Response: GeoJSON Feature with LineString geometry
With hiking attributes in the tiles, properties additionally carries:
{
"max_sac_scale": "T3",
"sac_scale": { "T1": "hiking", "T2": "mountain_hiking",
"T3": "demanding_mountain_hiking" },
"surface_segments": { "unpaved": 788, "paved": 16 },
"via_ferrata_sections": 36,
"routes": [
{ "network": "rwn", "network_label": "regional",
"name": "Malerweg", "segments": 68, "share_percent": 28 }
],
"terrain_warnings": [
"hardest section on this route is T3 = demanding_mountain_hiking near ...",
"trail_visibility=horrible near 47.08226,9.61025 -- the path may be hard ..."
]
}
sac_scale_data appears instead of sac_scale when nothing along the route
is tagged — that is a reminder that the difficulty is unknown, not that it is
easy.
Profile weights (OpenMapTiles transportation layer class attribute):
Road class
foot
bike
footway, path, pedestrian
preferred (1.0)
not passable
cycleway
allowed (1.3)
preferred (1.0)
track
1.1
1.2
residential, living_street
1.2–1.3
1.1
tertiary
1.8
1.4
secondary
2.5
1.6
primary
not passable
2.5
motorway, trunk
not passable
not passable
steps
1.2
not passable
Duration estimate: 4.5 km/h for foot, 15 km/h for bike. With
elevation=true and contours.mbtiles present, foot switches to a
DIN 33466 / SAC estimate instead (300 m ascent or 500 m descent per hour,
combined as max(horizontal, vertical) + min(horizontal, vertical) / 2).
Hiking attributes: sac_scale, via ferratas, surface
OpenMapTiles is a rendering schema. Its transportation layer whitelists the
attributes it keeps, and sac_scale, trail_visibility and
via_ferrata_scale are not on that list — they exist in the OSM source data
but are dropped during tile generation. The practical consequence is severe: a
router cannot tell a T1 stroll from a T5 scramble, and via ferratas appear as
ordinary paths. A route from the Zugspitze to the Alpspitze happily runs over
"Stopselzieher" and "Höllentalsteig", both cabled climbing routes with ladders
and a glacier crossing.
sms therefore evaluates these attributes when they are present:
Attribute
Used for
sac_scale
max_sac_scale filter, terrain_warnings, extra time for T3+ on foot
via_ferrata_scale, ladder
allow_via_ferrata=false filter, warnings
trail_visibility
warning at bad/horrible/no
smoothness, tracktype
weighting for bike — decides riding vs. pushing
mtb_scale
warning at 4+
surface
statistics, minor weighting
osm_id
warnings link to the way on openstreetmap.org, and group repeated sections
Where a way carries a real grade, the name-based fallback heuristic ("...steig",
"Ferrata", "Grat") is suppressed — the "Höllentalsteig" near Garmisch is tagged
T2, so warning about its name would contradict the data. The heuristic stays
active on untagged ways.
To get them, the tiles must be built with a planetiler whose OpenMapTiles
profile emits those fields — see
markuman/planetiler, which adds them
at z14. /v1/capabilities reports under difficulty_data whether the loaded
tiles carry them.
Without such tiles everything still works, just without difficulty data:
untagged ways are never excluded and never penalised, so routing behaves
exactly as before. That is deliberate — most of the world has no sac_scale,
and excluding untagged ways would produce empty results while pretending to be
safe. An untagged path can be anything.
Marked hiking routes
OpenMapTiles flattens route relations into route_1_* … route_4_* on the
transportation_name layer, so the tiles know which ways carry the E3, the
Malerweg, a Via Alpina stage or a local marked trail. A way on a marked route
is signposted, maintained and usually the scenic line, so prefer_routes=true
gives those a weight discount, ordered by network importance:
Network
Meaning
Factor
iwn / icn
international
0.70
nwn / ncn
national
0.72
rwn / rcn
regional
0.78
lwn / lcn
local
0.85
Road route relations (DE:national, cz:regional, e-road) are not
weighted — those are road numbers, not trails.
follow_route=Forststeig pulls much harder (factor 0.25) towards one specific
route. This exists because plain waypoint routing cuts the loops a marked
trail makes: on the Forststeig Elbsandstein the rock-group detours
(Müllerstein, Rotstein, Spanghorn) are skipped unless every one of them is a
waypoint. Measured on that trail:
Distance
Routes followed
plain
13.11 km
—
prefer_routes
13.11 km
Gelber Balken 49 %, Roter Punkt 32 %
follow_route=Forststeig
14.83 km
Forststeig Elbsandstein 28 %
Both are weightings, not filters: unmarked ways stay available, so a
region without marked routes still routes normally. follow_route returns a
404 if no such route exists in the corridor, and a terrain_warnings entry
if the route exists but does not connect the two points.
The response lists the routes actually used under properties.routes with the
share of the track:
Route geometry lives in its own generalised layer, so routes are matched to
graph edges by proximity (~200 m grid on the segment midpoints).
Tile selection: corridor instead of bounding box
Tiles are loaded as a corridor along the straight line between the two
points, not as a bounding box. At 48° N a zoom-14 tile is about 1.64 km wide,
so a bounding box for a diagonal 50 km route covers ~1260 tiles of which most
are nowhere near the route. The corridor keeps only tiles within
buffer_km of the line:
Route
Corridor
Old bounding box
Saving
30 km diagonal
112 tiles
484 tiles
4.3x
50 km diagonal
276 tiles
1260 tiles
4.6x
50 km at 15°
239 tiles
598 tiles
2.5x
50 km axis-parallel
99 tiles
100 tiles
1.0x
For an almost axis-parallel route the bounding box is naturally narrow
already, so the default buffer is capped at the box's short side and the
corridor never ends up loading materially more than a bbox would.
Limits:
max_tiles: 1200 tiles at zoom 14 (OOM guard, configurable via
ROUTE_MAX_TILES)
max_crow_km: 50 km straight-line distance per segment (configurable via
ROUTE_MAX_CROW_KM). Longer tours are possible via the plan_route MCP
tool, which chains segments.
Start and end points must be within 500 m of a routable road. Both ends are
snapped onto the same connected part of the network — vector tiles are
clipped at tile borders, so the decoded graph contains many short
disconnected stubs that would otherwise swallow the start point.
No turn restrictions and no access tags (OSM relations and access=private
are not stored in vector tiles)
Routing always uses zoom 14. There is deliberately no zoom-13 fallback:
path and footway have minzoom 14 in OpenMapTiles, so on z13 exactly the
ways that matter for hiking disappear.
Decoded tiles are cached (see TILE_CACHE_SIZE), so repeated queries in the
same region are much faster than the first one. Expect ~0.2–2 s cold and
well under 0.5 s warm for a 50 km segment. Memory stays within the
documented 512 MB.
Error responses:
400 — invalid parameters, straight-line distance over the limit, or
corridor over max_tiles
404 — no road network in area, no way passable for the profile, start or
end further than 500 m from a road, or no route found
POST /v1/elevation/{identifier}@{version}
Estimate ascent and descent of a track by intersecting it with the contour
lines from contours.mbtiles. Only available when that file is present.
Accuracy is limited by the contour interval (about ±half an interval), so
treat these as estimates, not survey data.
Error responses:
400 — invalid body or area too large
404 — no contours.mbtiles loaded
GET /v1/gpx/{id}.gpx
Download a GPX file previously generated by the plan_route or export_gpx
MCP tool. The id is the gpx_id from the tool result.
Response:application/gpx+xml (GPX 1.1, with <wpt> waypoints and
<ele> values when contours were available)
Generated files are cleaned up automatically: anything older than
GPX_TTL_SECONDS is removed, and at most GPX_MAX_FILES are kept.
Error responses:
404 — unknown or expired id
POST /v1/gpx
Upload a GPX file and get a gpx_id back — the input side of the
analyze_gpx MCP tool. The body is either the raw document
(application/gpx+xml, text/xml, anything) or a multipart form with a
file field. GPX 1.0 and 1.1 are accepted, <trk> segments are
concatenated, <rte> is used when there is no track. Files with a DOCTYPE
or entity declarations are rejected (no defusedxml dependency, so no
entity expansion at all).
curl -s -X POST --data-binary @tour.gpx localhost:9000/v1/gpx
The file is stored verbatim (download is byte-identical) and subject to the
same TTL / max-files housekeeping as generated tracks.
Error responses:
400 — not a usable GPX (malformed, fewer than two points, DOCTYPE)
413 — larger than GPX_MAX_UPLOAD_BYTES
GET /v1/gpx/{id}/analysis
REST twin of the analyze_gpx MCP tool (see below). Query parameters:
profile, poi_categories (comma separated), poi_max_off_km,
elevation_source, tileset.
Map UI routing options
The map UI exposes the same knobs: a transport dropdown (hiking / bike), a
difficulty dropdown (T1–T6, default "egal"/any) and an "ohne Klettersteig"
checkbox which is on by default — a hiking UI should not silently route
over a via ferrata — plus a "markierte Wege" checkbox (also on by default)
for prefer_routes. The names of the marked trails the route follows are
shown below the toolbar. Changing any of them recalculates all segments, and
terrain_warnings are shown below the toolbar with the OSM way linked.
Caching
Tiles are the hot path — a single pan fetches dozens of them — so everything
that can be cached is cached, and everything dynamic explicitly is not:
Tile ETags are <dataset>-<z>-<x>-<y>, where dataset is a fingerprint of
the .mbtiles file (mtime and size). Rebuilding the dataset therefore
invalidates every cached tile automatically — no version to bump, no cache to
purge. A revalidation costs one conditional request and returns 304 with an
empty body; measured over 20 tiles: 250 kB and 763 ms down to 0 kB and 9 ms,
and within max-age the browser does not even ask.
The ETag is checked before touching SQLite, so a revalidation is answered
without a database read.
MCP API (route planning for LLM agents)
sms exposes a Model Context Protocol
endpoint so that an LLM agent can plan hiking and trekking tours and export
them as GPX — without an external routing engine and without any additional
data source.
POST /mcp
Stateless JSON-RPC 2.0 (streamable HTTP without SSE). Implemented methods:
initialize, notifications/*, ping, tools/list, tools/call.
GET /mcp returns 405 — there is no event stream.
Register it with an MCP client, for example in opencode.json:
assess an uploaded GPX track: ways, difficulty, elevation, POIs along it
—
plan_route takes waypoints: [[lat, lon], ...] and routes each consecutive
pair separately. Each single segment must stay under max_crow_km, but the
total tour is unlimited — three 45 km segments give a 135 km track. If a
segment fails, the remaining segments are still returned and the failure is
reported per segment ("segment 2 (48.15,11.57 -> ...): no routable way within 500 m ..."), so the agent can fix that one waypoint instead of
guessing blindly.
Besides waypoints, profile and buffer_km, plan_route accepts the same
knobs as the REST endpoint:
Argument
Purpose
max_sac_scale
exclude terrain above a SAC grade
allow_via_ferrata
false keeps cabled climbing routes out
prefer_routes
prefer signposted trails
follow_route
follow one named trail, e.g. "Malerweg" or "E3"
elevation
ascent/descent from contours.mbtiles
export_gpx
write the GPX file (default true)
name
track name stored in the GPX file
tileset
pick a tileset as identifier@version when several are configured
The track geometry is deliberately not part of the tool result — a few
thousand track points as text would flood the model's context window. The
tool returns metadata plus a URL:
{
"name": "Karwendel-Durchquerung",
"distance_km": 42.1,
"duration_min": 561,
"ascent_m": 1840,
"descent_m": 1620,
"points": 3000,
"max_sac_scale": "T3",
"routes": [
{ "network": "iwn", "network_label": "international",
"ref": "E4", "name": "European long distance path E4",
"segments": 412, "share_percent": 41 }
],
"terrain_warnings": [
"hardest section on this route is T3 = demanding_mountain_hiking near 47.42107,11.06653; ..."
],
"gpx_url": "https://maps.example.org/v1/gpx/5c925fc1584040a4.gpx"
}
analyze_gpx — assessing an existing track
The reverse direction: the user already has a GPX (from a tour portal, a
friend, last year's recording) and wants to know what they are getting into.
Upload it with POST /v1/gpx, then call analyze_gpx with the gpx_id. The
ids returned by plan_route and export_gpx work as well, so an agent can
plan a tour and immediately check it for water and huts along the way.
The track is map-matched onto the tile network: it is resampled every
20 m and each sample is snapped to the nearest transportation segment within
30 m. From the matched segments the tool reports way classes, surfaces,
tagged difficulty and marked routes — everything plan_route reports, plus
the km position on the track ("VIA FERRATA at km 12.0 (…)"). Samples with
no way within 30 m count as off-network: pathless terrain (alpine
crossings, glaciers, fords) or ways missing in the tiles — either way the
agent cannot say anything about those sections and is told so.
POIs are collected along the corridor with their position on the track and
distance off it. poi_summary gives, per category, the count and the
longest gap — "16 km without drinking water" is the number that decides
how much to carry.
auto (track <ele> when ≥ 90 % of points have it, else contours), gpx, contours
tileset
identifier@version
Elevation from the track's own <ele> is smoothed with a 10 m hysteresis;
barometric recordings are good, plain GPS elevation still tends to overstate.
Pass elevation_source: "contours" to cross-check.
What the agent can and cannot know
With tiles built from the extended profile,
difficulty is available where OSM contributors tagged it: plan_route
accepts max_sac_scale and allow_via_ferrata, and returns
terrain_warnings, max_sac_scale and the marked trails under routes.
Agents are told to pass those on verbatim.
What still cannot be known, and what the tool descriptions say explicitly:
Untagged ways are unknown, not easy. They are never excluded and never
penalised (see above for why), so a route may still contain a T5 scramble
that nobody tagged. A missing warning means missing data.
Via ferratas are ordinary paths in the data. Where no
via_ferrata_scale exists, only a name heuristic ("…steig", "Ferrata",
"Grat") is left — it produces false positives and misses unnamed ways.
max_sac_scale and allow_via_ferrata are independent axes. A way can
be T6 scrambling without a ferrata tag, and a cabled route can be tagged
T2. Set both.
Not in the tiles at all: seasonal closures, wildlife sanctuaries with
right-of-way restrictions, access=private, turn restrictions, hut opening
hours, prices and whether a hut is staffed.
On stock OpenMapTiles tiles none of the difficulty data exists./v1/capabilities reports this under difficulty_data; when those flags
are false, the agent is flying blind and should say so.
Never treat a generated track as a safety assessment — cross-check it against
a topographic map before walking it.
GET /v1/static/{identifier}@{version}/{file}
Serves vendored MapLibre GL JS/CSS static assets.
Path Parameters:
identifier — Asset identifier (maplibre-gl)
version — Asset version (5.19.0)
file — File name: maplibre-gl.css or maplibre-gl.js
Response: CSS or JavaScript file
For the curious, advanced, or developers of this server itself
Hosting your own vector map tiles to show them in a browser requires quite a few components:
JavaScript and CSS
A Javascript and CSS library, such as MapLibre GL, and your own code to run this library, pointing it to a style file
Style file
A JSON file that defines how the library should visually style the map data, and where it should find the map tiles, glyphs (fonts), and the sprite. This server transforms the built-in Style files on the fly to be able to refer to any map data.
Glyphs (fonts)
Different fonts can be used for different labels and zoom levels, as defined in the Style file. The fonts must Signed Distance Field (SDF) fonts wrapped in a particular Protocol Buffer format. The Style file can refer to "stacks" of fonts; but unlike CSS, the server combines the fonts on the fly in an API where the resulting "font" has at most one glyph from each source font.
Sprite
A sprite is actually 4 URLs: a JSON index file and a single PNG file, and a "@2x" JSON index file and PNG files for higher pixel ratio devices (e.g. Retina). The JSON files contains the offsets and sizes of images within corresponding PNG file. The style file refers the common "base" of these. For example, if the style file has "sprite":"https://my.test/sprite" then the 4 files must be at https://my.test/sprite.json, https://my.test/sprite.png, https://my.test/[email protected] and https://my.test/[email protected].
Vector map tiles
A set of often millions of tiles each covering a different location and different zoom level. These can be distributed as a single mbtiles file, but this is not the format that the Javascript library accepts. This on-the-fly conversion from the mbtiles file to tiles is the main feature of this server.
The mbtiles file is a SQLite file, containing gzipped Mapbox Vector Tile tiles. This server leaves the un-gzipping to the browser, by sending tiles with a content-encoding: gzip header, which results in browser un-gzipping the tile data before it hits the Javascript.
Licenses
The code of the server itself is released under the MIT license. However, several components included in mbtiles_s3_server/vendor/ are released under different licenses.