Ilya wrote about the 10th anniversary of OSM adopting the ODbL license yesterday. He has a cool 2012-2022 map compare web site to go with it. It’s incredible to see what we, the OSM community, have accomplished building our map in 10 years.

Ilya is a pretty technical guy and it’s not a huge thing for him to set up an OSM tile server from scratch. But what if you want to create something similar and you’re perhaps not quite that technical? If that’s you, I have something you might be interested in! It’s a little open source project on Github called openstreetmap-vintage-tile-server. With it, you can create a side-by-side map in a few pretty simple steps. The README on Github explains it pretty well, so I won’t repeat it here, but the steps are basically:

1. Make sure you have docker and osmium installed
2. Download a full history planet for the area you’re interested in (Geofrabrik has these, but you have to log in with your OSM account)
3. Run the script

When it finishes, the tiles should be available on your local machine. The script will give you the URL to go to. There’s also an HTML example that you can use to create an interactive side by side map like this:

(There used to be a video here but it wouldn’t embed correctly.. There’s a link below in the comments.)

I would recommend using a planet file for one country, otherwise it can take a pretty long time to import, but if you have enough disk space and patience, it should work for the entire globe.

Now, if you would like to host this on the internet, you would need to run the script on a server that people can access, and configure a reverse proxy in Apache or nginx. That part is still a bit technical, if you’re interested I can add it to the README. But I’m not an expert in expert either :) Other suggestions for improvement are welcome as well! Happy mapping!