packet_mover (u/packet_mover)

packet_mover commented on Show HN: Offline tiles and routing and geocoding in one Docker Compose stack corviont.com/... · Posted by u/packet_mover

Natfan · a month ago

mild critique: this website looks _incredibly_ vibe coded.

packet_mover · a month ago

It is built in a website builder (https://unicornplatform.com/). I kept it intentionally simple while I validate demand - the real artifact is the demo + repo/docs, the site mostly just points people there and helps with validation.

If you have 1-2 concrete suggestions on what makes it feel that way (copy/layout/typography), I am happy to improve it.

packet_mover commented on Show HN: Offline tiles and routing and geocoding in one Docker Compose stack corviont.com/... · Posted by u/packet_mover

dennis16384 · a month ago

Well, trying out is better than a thousands words

Let's start it with index of whole Spain, 2.4gb download, 4gb on disk: https://gist.github.com/dkourilov/e243270684b5973f1fac005c78...

I'd say it's pretty usable to run a EU-sized country or several US states on any commodity PC. For embedded devices, it really depends what is the device. On Raspberry PI it should be fine for batch geocoding, realtime (typeahead) will definitely be lagging.

packet_mover · a month ago

Thanks both - appreciate the clarification and the Spain datapoint.

Those numbers look pretty reasonable. I’ll keep Photon in mind and, as I get time to benchmark different approaches on a few representative regions/hardware, I’ll use the results to decide what the best way forward is - and I’ll publish the numbers when I do.

packet_mover commented on Show HN: Offline tiles and routing and geocoding in one Docker Compose stack corviont.com/... · Posted by u/packet_mover

t0mk · a month ago

I would prefer to run the build locally/myself, and to specify either a bounding box with lon and lat, or a country. The output would be data files and/or docker images with data. But as sibling comment said, if you plan to sell it, I understand it makes less sense to offer building logic.

I get why you created the monaco pack, it's a nice demo and fast to download and run. I would rather choose a big city where potential users live (london, nyc, the bay,?), but maybe there are technicalities that make that more complex.

Drawing box on a map in browser and generating the tiles, routing and geocoding db sounds quite heavy for backend compute. There was a project wiht a website that could generate a tileset (pmtiles file?) from box drawn on a map, but I can't find it now. There was a limit to the box size and if it was over some threshold, you had to have premium, or contact sales, or sth, I thought it was protomaps, but no tool like that there now.

Anyway really nice idea, I will follow your progress for sure!

packet_mover · a month ago

Thanks, appreciate the context.

Bounding box input is a really interesting idea. For my product, the best use would probably be to automate the request/fulfillment flow if this ever picks up. Letting someone draw/paste a bbox makes the request unambiguous and could be automated end-to-end.

Btw, the pack build process isn’t that compute-heavy. It’s not instant, but as a rough data point: on my laptop, a small country like Austria/Slovakia is on the order of ~1 hour to build the three artifacts (tiles + routing tiles + SQLite geocoder).

packet_mover commented on Show HN: Offline tiles and routing and geocoding in one Docker Compose stack corviont.com/... · Posted by u/packet_mover

tomaskafka · a month ago

Thanks for reply! It’s great to hear it’s configurable.

I didn’t realize how many use cases are there - you guessed right that for my use the whole world, but only up to city level, is quite enough.

In my todo list I have adding landmarks, so that I could eg. show a nearby mountain when outdoors and far away from city, but then deciding which POI types to include gets much trickier.

packet_mover · a month ago

Yeah, I also ran into that when ranking geocoding results - you want to show more "important"/notable places first. In your case, one pragmatic approach could be to keep only features with wikidata or wikipedia tags (and maybe a small whitelist like natural=peak, tourism=viewpoint/attraction).

This is also why I lean on Nominatim-derived data for Corviont - it already condenses a lot of this into a single importance/ranking model. I have not tried a whole-world build though, so I am not sure how well that behaves at planet scale.

packet_mover commented on Show HN: Offline tiles and routing and geocoding in one Docker Compose stack corviont.com/... · Posted by u/packet_mover

ikawe · a month ago

Transit routing is provided by OpenTripPlanner, so the deployment artifact is their OTP serialized graph format.

So it’s not really incremental with respect to the existing transit zone deployment. I just mean I can redeploy a single transit zone with the latest GTFS without having to touch the other transit zones, tileserver, geocoder, etc.

Deployment/rollback is handled by k8s config.

packet_mover · a month ago

Thank you, that's very helpful.

packet_mover commented on Show HN: Offline tiles and routing and geocoding in one Docker Compose stack corviont.com/... · Posted by u/packet_mover

dennis16384 · a month ago

Have you measured actual memory and disk requirements of a photon OpenSearch index vs your sqlite database?

packet_mover · a month ago

No. When I looked at Photon and saw that it involves running Java plus an OpenSearch/Elasticsearch backend on the device, I assumed it would be heavier in terms of memory and moving parts than my setup (single SQLite file + small HTTP API).

Have you (or anyone here) actually run Photon on edge-class hardware? If you have real-world numbers, I'd be interested in seeing them. When I add house-number search, Photon might be an easier route than enhancing my current approach.

packet_mover commented on Show HN: Offline tiles and routing and geocoding in one Docker Compose stack corviont.com/... · Posted by u/packet_mover

mike_d · a month ago

> Why not create a "builder" repo, where people could generate their own local datasets by a bounding box?

If you read the bottom of the page they plan to sell it. Not sure how that works when all the software/data is open.

packet_mover · a month ago

Yes - I do plan to sell Corviont, and it is worth explaining the licensing bit.

It is built on open-source components and OSM-derived data, so the obligations are mostly (a) keeping third-party software licensing/attribution intact, and (b) OSM/ODbL compliance - clear attribution, and if you distribute derived OSM databases, meeting the ODbL share-alike requirements for those database artifacts.

I am handling this via attribution in the UI/docs and a licensing reference bundled with the dataset that points to a public licensing/attribution repo containing the third-party license texts and details: http://github.com/corviont/licensing

What I am selling is the packaging + ops side: ready-to-run region packs and (eventually) a signed updater for fleets.

packet_mover commented on Show HN: Offline tiles and routing and geocoding in one Docker Compose stack corviont.com/... · Posted by u/packet_mover

onaclov2000 · a month ago

Definitely interesting, I don't see an obvious comment on hardware requirements, do you know what those are?

I've played around with OSRM, and Nominatim, etc, but had to do some trickery to run on a raspberry pi.

(For anyone interested in running some of these kind of things on a pi, I talk about it generally here, I need to post an update with more info at some point. http://blog.onaclovtech.com/2025/02/general-purpose-to-speci...)

packet_mover · a month ago

I do not have published benchmarks yet (I want to collect a few real region packs first and then write this up properly).

One goal of Corviont is to avoid the on-device pain you hit with OSRM/Nominatim: the region pack is built once elsewhere, and the edge box mostly just serves prebuilt artifacts (PMTiles tiles, Valhalla routing tiles, and a SQLite geocoder index based on Nominatim).

In practice, requirements scale with region size and traffic. For larger regions the main constraint is usually SSD storage plus enough RAM headroom for routing/cache. I also picked Valhalla partly because it generally has a smaller RAM footprint than OSRM at serving time (OSRM is extremely fast but tends to be more memory-hungry).

packet_mover commented on Show HN: Offline tiles and routing and geocoding in one Docker Compose stack corviont.com/... · Posted by u/packet_mover

t0mk · a month ago

I like how you packed only the necessities - tiles for maps, routing, and geocoding index in in sqlite. I checked the monaco deployment and missed lookup with street number, as someone else also pointed out.

Why not create a "builder" repo, where people could generate their own local datasets by a bounding box?

packet_mover · a month ago

Yeah, house-number lookup is not there yet. The demo geocoder does place/street-level search + reverse, but house numbers need a richer address index - it's on the roadmap.

Re: a bbox "builder" repo - it's an interesting idea. I could see it going two ways: (a) you want to run a bbox builder yourself, or (b) you want a simple way to specify a bbox so the dataset pack can be produced for you.

I started with the "ship a known-good pack" approach because the build pipeline is the messy part, and I want deployed boxes to stay simple/reproducible.

For your use case, which did you mean - run the build locally, or "draw/paste a bbox and get back a ready-to-run pack"? And would bbox be OK, or do you prefer admin boundaries (country/state/city)?

packet_mover commented on Show HN: Offline tiles and routing and geocoding in one Docker Compose stack corviont.com/... · Posted by u/packet_mover

ikawe · a month ago

(Headway maintainer here)

Indeed there is currently no incremental update in Headway, and deployments are largely an exercise left to the reader.

For maps.earth (a Headway planet deployment), I typically rebuild the world, and then do a blue/green deployment.

I guess the one exception is for transit routing. We have individual transit zones small enough to fit into memory, which can be deployed incrementally. There’s nothing really built in about it - just another level of indirection via our “travelmux” service which redirects your routing queries to a different backend depending on mode and region.

packet_mover · a month ago

Thanks for chiming in - super helpful context.

I am trying to learn from real deployments as I design Corviont's updater for edge boxes (bandwidth caps, maintenance windows, unreliable WAN, atomic swap + rollback).

When you say transit "zones" are small enough to deploy incrementally - what is the actual artifact per zone (roughly what format), and what sizes do you typically see?

And when a transit zone dataset changes, how do you roll that out safely - do you restart/reload the backend that serves that zone, or do you bring up a new backend/version and then flip travelmux to point at it?