// the find
hyperknot/openfreemap
Free and open-source map hosting solution with custom styles for websites and apps, using OpenStreetMap data
OpenFreeMap is a vector tile hosting solution for OpenStreetMap data that you can either self-host or use for free via their public instance. The clever core idea: instead of running a tile server, it serves 300 million files directly from Btrfs partition images via nginx, using the Linux kernel's file cache as the performance layer. Aimed at developers who need map tiles without paying Mapbox/Maptiler rates or running PostGIS.
The Btrfs-as-tile-server approach is genuinely original — hard-linking 300M tiles and letting nginx+kernel cache handle throughput hit 30 Gbit on loopback, which is not a number you fake. The public instance has no API keys, no rate limits, no cookies, and has been running MapHub in production since mid-2024, so it's not vaporware. Self-hosting is a single SSH command via Fabric that provisions a clean Ubuntu server end-to-end. Weekly full-planet downloads in both Btrfs and MBTiles formats means you can bring your own tiles to any other tooling.
This is explicitly a deploy script for dedicated Ubuntu servers, not something you can run in Docker or on a cloud VM without owning the block device — that rules out most developers' default infrastructure. The autoupdate mechanism comes with a caveat in the README itself: 'only use it if you keep a close eye on this repo', which is not confidence-inspiring for anything production. Style work lives in a separate repo and is still half-finished (missing POI icons, monolithic style files). No geocoding, routing, or raster tiles are in scope, so you will need to wire in other services for anything beyond basemap display.