Introduction

Barrelman is a self-hostable geospatial engine built on OpenStreetMap and PostGIS. Named after the sailor who watches the horizon from the crow's nest, it provides place search, spatial queries, vector tiles, routing, and transit — all from a single OSM extract, with no dependency on commercial map data APIs.

Barrelman is the engine that powers Parchment, a privacy-first maps and navigation app. Parchment is the product; Barrelman is the data and query layer beneath it. You can run Barrelman on its own and build directly against its REST API.

Capabilities

• Search — Fuzzy place search over an OSM extract using a hybrid pipeline (full-text, trigram, abbreviation, and optional semantic vector matching), with point-radius and route-corridor spatial modes.
• Geocoding — Forward geocoding (address → coordinates) and reverse geocoding (coordinates → address).
• Brand search — Autocomplete over a brand catalog to resolve chains and franchises (e.g. "Starbucks").
• Places — Place details by OSM ID, plus spatial relationship queries: which areas contain a point, and the children of an area.
• Tiles — Mapbox Vector Tiles served via Martin for map rendering.
• Routing — Turn-by-turn routing for car, bike, and foot via GraphHopper, enriched with elevation and path detail.
• Transit — Trip planning via MOTIS plus live GTFS-RT vehicle positions, departures, stops, and route detail.
• GBFS — Shared-mobility (bikeshare and scooter) systems and real-time station availability from GBFS feeds.
• Admin — A console and API for running data imports, migrations, and inspecting downstream service health.

Architecture

Barrelman ingests an OSM PBF extract with osm2pgsql, stores it in PostGIS (with pgvector for optional semantic search), and serves it through an Elysia API running on Bun. Tiles come from Martin and routing from GraphHopper, all sourced from the same extract.

Next steps

• Getting started — See Usage for the base URL, authentication, and example requests.
• API reference — See the API Reference for every endpoint, grouped by capability.