[homebrewer]

We've been self-hosting protomaps (aka pmtiles) for several years. The only thing you need server-side is a web server that can serve static files and supports range requests (so anything works; I've tried caddy and nginx). The map is one large file, it's easy to share it between however many servers you need.

https://docs.protomaps.com/guide/getting-started

Downsides? Nothing major that I can think of. You have to add another client-side dependency (support for their custom protocol); the library is pretty small and easy to audit.

Editing map styles is slightly more difficult because generic maplibre styles won't work with it: they add a bit of custom sauce on top. IIRC this editor worked fine, you can import one of protomaps styles and base your work off it:

https://maputnik.github.io/editor

That's probably it.

[throw_away_623]

Are the names of cities/streets included in the tiles, or do they have to be placed from a different data source?

[homebrewer]

No, the names are there in the file, streets included. Their default styles did not support the languages we needed out of the box (everything was shown in the local language or English IIRC), but it was easy to fix by patching the style. I don't remember the exact fix, but it was about as simple as replacing something like `["get", "name_en"]` with `["get", ["coalesce", "name_xx", "name_en"]]`.

[throw_away_623]

Is there enough information to show exact addresses? For example "221B Baker Street"

[homebrewer]

Sure. You can look at their demo, it uses the exact same single-file hosting mechanism (the network requests tab in the browser dev tools confirms it — it doesn't send any other requests), and street/house addresses are visible on the map.

https://maps.protomaps.com

[yuretz]

How do you update pmiles? Do you have to rebuild the entire map every time? If so, I think that's a downside/limitation for some use cases.

[nickserv]

Don't know about pmtiles specifically, but on tile servers I've used it's possible to update administrative regions separately.