Increase privacy by using nginx as a caching proxy in front of a map tile server
pierre-couy.dev
A tutorial featuring two examples showing how you can increase your privacy using nginx to proxy third-party services.

This 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

    • @[email protected]OP
      6•3 months ago

      It’s still available in Debian’s default repositories, so it must still be open source (at least the version that’s packaged for Debian)

      • @[email protected]
        0•3 months ago

        I think the changes happened after Debian 12 was released so it might just have the last open-source version in the repo. And someone made a fork immediately so it could be that too.

          • @[email protected]
            1•3 months ago

            Maybe it added telemetry instead of going proprietary. I don’t exactly remember what happened. I saw news about it on Lemmy but my client doesn’t support search so I can’t find it now easily.

            • @[email protected]
              8•3 months ago

              A core developer quit and forked it to make freenginx, based on a claim of corporate interference in security practices.

              This was about 6 months ago and probably what you are thinking of. Its still open source, there doesn’t seem to be anything that’s come of the issue that was the cause of the split, and nginx is still actively developed.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•3 months ago

      I don’t think so. I’m sure I would have heard something about that for work related reasons. That would be quite a problem for the kubernetes ecosystem since nginx is so widely used there as an ingress controller.

      The nginx website still lists a “bsd-like license” as what the source code is released under: https://nginx.org/LICENSE