Increase privacy by using nginx as a caching proxy in front of a map tile server
pierre-couy.devThis is a guide I wrote for Immich’s documentation. It features some Immich specific parts, but should be quite easy to adapt to other use cases.
It is also possible (and not technically hard) to self-host a protomaps release, but this would require 100GB+ of disk space (which I can’t spare right now). The main advantages of this guide over hosting a full tile server are :
- it’s a single nginx config file to deploy
- it saves you some storage space since you’re only hosting tiles you’ve previously viewed. You can also tweak the maximum cache size to your needs
- it is easy to configure a trade-off between map freshness and privacy by tweaking the cache expiration delay
If you try to follow it, please send me some feedback on the content and the wording, so I can improve it
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 57 users / day
- 383 users / week
- 1.5K users / month
- 5.7K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 2.97K Posts
- 74.6K Comments
- Modlog
I just learned about OpenFreeMap. I’ve not done it but it touts itself as a simple way to host your own tile server. I’m assuming that your proxy would work for a self hosted tile server with a few alterations.
Thank you for the link. I’ve seen it posted a few days ago.
The caching proxy for this tutorial should easily work with any tile server, including self-hosted. However, I’m not sure what the benefits would be if you are already self-hosting a tile server.
Lastly, the self-hosting documentation for OpenFreeMap mentions a 300GB of storage + 4GB of RAM requirement just for serving the tiles, which is still more than I can spare