At some point during Placemark development, I tried making a free-as-in-beer interface that supported a lot of the things that Placemark could, but for free. The main difference between this and the main application being that Placemark Play wouldn't have a real server component, so it incurred no real storage or server costs for me.

People like free stuff and a lot of people don't want or need Placemark's server storage for maps, so Play got a bit of a following. This subproject is trying to run Play again.

It's not easy, I'll tell you that! Placemark was, for many reasons, a monolithic application, and Play was part of that monolith. So there are challenges to slicing off just a bit of the application.

This directory is basically the application, minus Blitz and the database layer and all of that. It's a real experiment - expect breakage, and hopefully contribute pull requests. I'm happy to try and make Placemark useful to folks, and don't feel bad or bitter about the fate of the company, but realistically if the open source project is to succeed, it'll need contributors as well as users.

There are more sophisticated approaches using Docker or Render (see files), but the following simple approach works locally on macOS:

1. Clone the repository, change to this directory, and install dependencies:

git clone
pnpm install

2. Obtain a Mapbox public access token (docs) and Geocode Earth token (docs).

3. Build the package with the tokens from the previous step:

VITE_PUBLIC_MAPBOX_TOKEN="<your Mapbox public access token>" \
VITE_PUBLIC_GEOCODE_EARTH_TOKEN="<your Geocode Earth token>" \
pnpm build

4. Start the server:

npx serve@latest out

5. Visit https://localhost:3000

If you're planning to run this often or publicly, take care to secure your tokens better by adding URL restrictions to the Mapbox token and setting allowed Referrer Hostnames to the Geocode Earth one.

For local development, copy .env.example to .env.local and add your tokens there:

cp .env.example .env.local