Running Reitti in a privacy preserving manner

[nebula-it]

Reitti by default relies on some external services to work. To my understanding, primarily its these two:

• Geocoding: To convert coordinates into addresses
• Tiles: To fetch the map tiles to show map in browser

Most of us selfhost this stuff so our data stays private, so opening this discussion to layout details of how we can run Reitti in a manner where it preserves user privacy.

IMO Geocoding service is one we need to focus on first, as it gets all the coordinates a user has stored in Reitti. Also it might be easier to self host v/s the tiles(given the data size). Tiles on the other hand is just fetching tiles for an area and does not necessarily gets the exact coordinates a user has stored in Reitti. It is still possible to infer the general location when user is browsing (as tiles for that area will be fetched).

So to start, lets try to answer two questions:

• What options do we have to self host Geocoding.
  • Reitti uses Paikka, so that might be an option
• What does Reitti look like without a Geocoding service? Is it possible to use it without Geocoding service?

[dgraf-gh]

Hi @nebula-it,

thank you for starting this discussion, and you pointed out exactly the two spots where reitti relies on external services.

Both are solvable, but they come at a cost, mainly in storage requirements:

• Geocoding: either a self-hosted paikka instance, or, in the past, we shipped photon in the docker-compose file. → Documentation
  • You can find the space requirements for photon here
  • For paikka, they are documented here
• Maps: this one gets a little trickier. Personally, I host an instance of openfreemap for everyone to use under https://tiles.dedicatedcode.com
  • openfreemap uses btrfs snapshots to update itself, which is a pretty neat idea and I really like it. According to their documentation, the whole planet takes around 300 GB. In my experience, you need more than 500 GB to get it running, but that could also have been a hiccup on my side.

Right now, I host both services on a Contabo VPS for €14/month:

Storage VPS 30 (without setup)
Disk Space: 1,000 GB
CPU cores:  6
RAM:        18 GB

One thing to note: I only host them there. For paikka, I calculate the bundle roughly once per month on my mini-pc and push it to the host. Otherwise, it would clog up the machine.