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
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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
What is a map tile server?
It’s a server that hosts map data for the whole world, and sends map fragments (tiles)as pictures for the coordinates and zoom levels that clients request from them
Ah, thanks. Brain in weekend already.
Great to see you in the wild again! Any update from Immich devs?
There have been some changes in a few recent releases related to the concerns I raised :