Show HN: Desert Atlas, a self-hosted OpenStreetMap app for Sandstorm

[orblivion]

https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-12-05-osm-on-sandstorm

Hi all,

This project release is a long time coming. It was a big uphill battle, and by far my largest endeavor so far. I built it for Sandstorm because I believe in Sandstorm's model, and I wanted to show that there's still life and potential in it. If you're inspired, joining our OpenCollective would be really helpful: https://opencollective.com/sandstormcommunity (keeping in mind that Sandstorm has now moved from its original leadership to a community project https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-11-03-from-io-to-org).

You can also join our mailing list or connect on the fediverse: https://sandstorm.org/community (The IRC link is outdated, we've effectively moved to Matrix for now due to the libera.chat split: https://matrix.to/#/#sandstorm:libera.chat)

Also: I'm open for hire! You can see some of my skills in putting things together in this blog post. I'd love to work in something FOSS or OSM related, but not a requirement. I mostly do Python and Golang, with a bit of Haskell under my belt. Other projects and resume here: https://github.com/orblivion/me

[karussell]

Note, that Nominatim is not based on ElasticSearch but PostgreSQL and recently are working on "Nominatim lite" (with SQLite): https://nominatim.org/2023/10/25/sqlite-reverse.html

Maybe the confusion stems from the part that the same dev is also the dev of photon? (which is based on ElasticSearch)

[orblivion → karussell]

I could have sworn it was ElasticSearch. But yeah maybe I found Photon when I was looking for alternatives. I'll fix the post.

Thank you for this very useful info, I will keep my eye on Nominatim lite! If it's coming soon I can focus on things other than search for now.

[fishtacos]

It's kinda amazing that Sandstorm still has a relatively interested following, especially among devs. Kenton Varda would be proud (kvarda - hackernews username).

I was a huge fan of the project during its hay day, yet it didn't gather enough interest to make it popular as a self-hosting solution. For the apps it still has (including this one), it's still unmatchable.

[abdullahkhalids → fishtacos]

What essential apps does it not have according to you?

[fishtacos → abdullahkhalids]

Sandstorm requires rewriting of every app to make it compatible with its security architecture. You can look at Cloudron to see what it's missing. Last I checked, Yuno was a close second, but not nearly as polished.

Regardless, that does not diminish its usefulness. I ran it for several years and love the idea of isolated instances one can share with unique links. Learned a lot just hosting it, so thanks again, Kenton - he was on IRC chat when I had a question. True geek through and through.

[ocdtrekkie → fishtacos]

"Rewriting" is perhaps a slight exaggeration, but packaging apps for Sandstorm usually requires some changes. A lot of time the features we need apps to have are useful for apps to support anyways. Sometimes we are able to get improvements included upstream which make Sandstorm packaging easier. But it is definitely fair to say some apps require some significant work to adapt to Sandstorm, and some don't make sense on Sandstorm at all.

Honestly my strong preference is for apps to be written directly for Sandstorm, though obviously there is a big chicken and egg problem to getting people to build apps to run on Sandstorm instead of Docker-based tools.

[zertrin]

Ah, very interesting! I still have my sandstorm running over these many years (although seldom used, but amazingly it just continues to run/auto-update with no admin work needed).

I like the idea a lot, thanks for developing this and sharing to the community!

[orblivion → zertrin]

Thank you! If you try it out please do let me know what you think, especially what the biggest pain points are.

[mwfogleman]

Wait, Sandstorm is still alive??? Amazing!

[bedros]

to developers of sandstorm, can you guys add newly popular apps such as baserow.io

[ocdtrekkie → bedros]

The folks working on it right now are a pretty small group, so we are definitely looking for help adding and maintaining app packages.

At a glance, probably the biggest pain point for Baserow would be that apparently they decided to "deprecate" installing it with anything except Docker[1]. Presumably between the deprecated guide and the Dockerfile, one could figure out how to do it anyways, but it would probably be a pretty significant amount of work.

[1] https://baserow.io/docs/installation%2Fold-install-on-ubuntu