// the find
apache/incubator-baremaps
Create custom vector tiles from OpenStreetMap and other data sources with Postgis and Java.
Apache Baremaps is a Java toolkit for building self-hosted map infrastructure: ingest OpenStreetMap PBF data into PostGIS, generate vector tiles, run a geocoder, and serve everything from one CLI. It targets developers who want full control over their mapping stack without paying for commercial tile APIs or being limited by hosted services.
The Calcite integration is genuinely interesting — you can query OSM data, GeoParquet, FlatGeoBuf, Shapefiles, and PostGIS through a unified SQL interface, which makes cross-source spatial joins that would otherwise require ETL scripts tractable. Live reload during map style development is a real time-saver for anyone who's suffered through the edit-export-refresh cycle of other tools. The breadth of supported formats (GeoParquet, GeoPackage, FlatGeoBuf, Shapefile, RPSL) is legitimately wide for a 564-star project. The IP-to-location service is a useful bonus that saves integrating a separate library.
Still in Apache incubation, which means API stability guarantees are effectively nonexistent — the DISCLAIMER file isn't decorative. PostGIS is a hard dependency for the core pipeline, so there's no lightweight path for smaller projects that don't want to run Postgres. The README is thin: it points to external docs for almost everything, and those docs lean heavily on happy-path examples without covering failure modes or production tuning. The Calcite layer, while clever, adds a significant abstraction stack and debugging SQL query plans through it when something goes wrong is genuinely painful.