managarten/services/mana-geocoding/CLAUDE.md

mana-geocoding

Self-hosted geocoding service. Wraps a local Pelias instance (DACH region) with caching and automatic OSM → PlaceCategory mapping. All geocoding queries stay within our infrastructure — no user location data leaves the network.

Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Runtime	Bun
Framework	Hono
Geocoding	Pelias (self-hosted, Elasticsearch-backed)
Data	OpenStreetMap DACH extract (DE/AT/CH)
Caching	In-memory LRU (5000 entries, 24h TTL)

Port: 3018

Quick Start

# 1. Start Pelias stack (first time: run setup.sh for data import)
cd services/mana-geocoding/pelias
docker compose up -d
# First time only:
chmod +x setup.sh && ./setup.sh

# 2. Start the Hono wrapper
cd services/mana-geocoding
bun run dev

API Endpoints

All endpoints are public (no auth required) — the service is internal-only, not exposed to the internet.

Method	Path	Description
GET	/api/v1/geocode/search?q=...	Forward geocoding / autocomplete
GET	/api/v1/geocode/reverse?lat=...&lon=...	Reverse geocoding
GET	/api/v1/geocode/stats	Cache statistics
GET	/health	Wrapper health
GET	/health/pelias	Upstream Pelias health (used by blackbox monitoring)

Forward-search strategy

The wrapper queries Pelias /autocomplete first (fast, fuzzy, optimised for venue names like "Konzil Restaurant"). If that returns zero features, it falls back to /search, which covers the address layer that autocomplete deliberately excludes as a performance optimisation.

This gives the best of both worlds: quick venue matches for free-text queries AND reliable results for street-style queries like "Marktstätte Konstanz". See src/routes/geocode.ts — the fallback is baked into the forward handler.

Search params

Param	Required	Description
q	yes	Search query (min 2 chars)
limit	no	Max results (default 5, max 20)
lang	no	Language (default de)
focus.lat	no	Bias results towards this latitude
focus.lon	no	Bias results towards this longitude

Reverse params

Param	Required	Description
lat	yes	Latitude
lon	yes	Longitude
lang	no	Language (default de)

Response format

{
  "results": [
    {
      "label": "Münster Café, Münsterplatz 3, 78462 Konstanz",
      "name": "Münster Café",
      "latitude": 47.663,
      "longitude": 9.175,
      "address": {
        "street": "Münsterplatz",
        "houseNumber": "3",
        "postalCode": "78462",
        "city": "Konstanz",
        "country": "Germany"
      },
      "category": "food",
      "peliasCategories": ["food", "retail", "nightlife"],
      "confidence": 0.95
    }
  ]
}

Category Mapping

Pelias' OSM importer tags each venue with its own taxonomy (food, retail, transport, health, education, …). We collapse those into the 7 PlaceCategories used by the Places module, using a priority-ordered list so the most specific signal wins:

PlaceCategory	Wins if Pelias categories contain
food	food (beats retail/nightlife — a restaurant is food)
transit	transport, transport:public, transport:air, transport:bus, transport:taxi, transport:sea
shopping	retail (when no food present)
leisure	entertainment, nightlife, recreation
work	education, professional, government, finance
other	health, religion, everything else
home	(not auto-detected — set manually by the user)

Example mappings verified on the DACH index:

OSM venue	Pelias categories	→ PlaceCategory
Konzil Konstanz Restaurant	[food, retail, nightlife]	food
Bahnhof Konstanz	[transport, transport:station]	transit
Physiotherapie-Schule	[education]	work
MX-Park (Rennstrecke)	[recreation]	leisure

The priority list lives in src/lib/category-map.ts — update it if you want a Pelias category to map somewhere else.

Critical: the Pelias API patch

By default, Pelias hides the category field from API responses unless the caller explicitly passes ?categories=... — a quirk intended for keyword filtering that also strips category metadata from normal address queries. We work around this by mounting a patched copy of helper/geojsonify_place_details.js over the upstream one in the pelias-api container (pelias/geojsonify_place_details.js). The patch changes condition: checkCategoryParam → condition: () => true so the category array always flows through to the wrapper.

If you bump the pelias/api image, regenerate the patched file:

cd services/mana-geocoding/pelias
docker run --rm pelias/api:latest cat /code/pelias/api/helper/geojsonify_place_details.js \
  | sed 's|condition: checkCategoryParam|condition: () => true|' \
  > geojsonify_place_details.js
docker compose up -d --force-recreate api

Architecture

Client (Places module)
  → mana-geocoding (Hono, port 3018)
    → LRU cache check
    → Pelias API (port 4000) [patched — see above]
      → Elasticsearch (port 9200)

Configuration

PORT=3018
PELIAS_API_URL=http://localhost:4000/v1
CORS_ORIGINS=http://localhost:5173,https://mana.how
CACHE_MAX_ENTRIES=5000
CACHE_TTL_MS=86400000

Pelias Infrastructure

The Pelias stack runs as a separate docker-compose in pelias/:

• elasticsearch — Index storage (Docker volume, ~5GB for DACH after indexing 13.4M OSM objects — 10M addresses + 3.3M venues)
• api — HTTP API (port 4000), patched for category passthrough
• libpostal — Address parsing (internal only, not exposed on host port because 4400 collides with mana-infra-landings on the Mac Mini)
• Import containers — Run once for initial data load, then stopped

Production RAM usage (measured on the Mac Mini after the 2026-04-11 deploy):

Container	RAM
pelias-elasticsearch	~1.2 GB
pelias-libpostal	~1.9 GB (address parser model)
pelias-api	~100 MB
mana-geocoding (wrapper)	~20–60 MB

Total: ~3.2 GB — larger than the initial ~1.5 GB estimate because libpostal loads its full address parser into memory up front.

Initial import (one-time)

The DACH PBF extract is ~5GB and takes 30-45 minutes to index. See pelias/setup.sh for the full pipeline. Key steps, in order:

1. docker compose up -d — bring up ES, api, libpostal
2. docker exec pelias-elasticsearch elasticsearch-plugin install analysis-icu then restart — the official ES image doesn't ship analysis-icu which Pelias' schema mapping requires
3. docker compose --profile import run --rm schema ./bin/create_index
4. docker compose --profile import run --rm openstreetmap ./bin/download (downloads dach-latest.osm.pbf from Geofabrik, ~5GB)
5. Rename dach-latest.osm.pbf → planet-latest.osm.pbf inside the pelias-data volume (Pelias' importer expects that filename). The pelias.json config references it as planet-latest.osm.pbf too.
6. docker compose --profile import run --rm openstreetmap ./bin/start (22M objects, ~30 min on an M2 Mac mini)

pelias.json gotchas

A few non-obvious settings required for a self-hosted DACH deployment:

• adminLookup.enabled: false — Pelias tries to resolve country/region hierarchies via "Who's On First" data by default. We don't import WOF, so this must be disabled or import crashes with unable to locate sqlite folder.
• leveldbpath: "/data/leveldb" — not /tmp/leveldb; the container user (1001) needs write access and /tmp is not mounted.
• api.services.libpostal: { url: "..." } — must be an object, not a string. The API's Joi schema rejects the string form.
• Only declare services you actually run. We used to list placeholder, pip, and interpolation in api.services but never ran the containers; Pelias logged ENOTFOUND errors on every query. Dropping the unused entries makes Pelias degrade cleanly to libpostal-only parsing (warns service disabled once at startup, then silent).
• No defaultParameters.boundary.country — Pelias only accepts a single country value for boundary.country. Since our index only contains DACH data anyway, we drop the filter entirely.
• features: { filename: "planet-latest.osm.pbf" } — required because Geofabrik downloads come named dach-latest.osm.pbf, but Pelias' openstreetmap importer looks for planet-latest.osm.pbf by default.

Wrapper gotchas

• idleTimeout: 60 on Bun.serve — the default 10 s cuts off cold queries that hit Elasticsearch and libpostal in sequence. 60 s is generous for the worst case while still catching actually-stuck connections.
• Colima bind-mount cache. The mac-mini bind-mounts this repo's files into several monitoring containers. Colima on macOS sometimes serves a stale view of a bind-mounted file even after the file on disk changes. After editing scripts/generate-status-page.sh (also bind-mounted into mana-status-gen), restart the consuming container so it sees the fresh content: docker restart mana-status-gen.
• host.docker.internal doesn't resolve from blackbox-exporter on Colima, so the external monitoring can't probe pelias-api or elasticsearch directly. Instead, the wrapper exposes /health/pelias which proxies a request to Pelias; Prometheus probes that internal endpoint inside the docker network. See prometheus.yml job blackbox-internal.

Testing

There is no automated test suite yet. The service was validated end-to-end during the 2026-04-11 deploy with a manual smoke-test set:

# From the mac-mini (or any container in the mana docker network):
curl -s "http://localhost:3018/api/v1/geocode/search?q=Konzil+Konstanz&limit=1"
curl -s "http://localhost:3018/api/v1/geocode/search?q=Stuttgart+Hauptbahnhof&limit=1"
curl -sG "http://localhost:3018/api/v1/geocode/search" \
  --data-urlencode "q=Marktstätte Konstanz" --data-urlencode "limit=1"
curl -s "http://localhost:3018/api/v1/geocode/reverse?lat=48.137&lon=11.575"
curl -s "http://localhost:3018/health/pelias"

Expected shape per result: {name, latitude, longitude, address, category, peliasCategories, confidence}. At least the major Konstanz/München/Berlin venues should resolve with sensible categories (restaurant → food, station → transit, school → work, park → leisure).

If you add logic here, at least add unit tests around lib/category-map.ts (the Pelias→PlaceCategory priority list is the most subtle part) and a smoke test that runs the above curls against a local stack.

Code Layout

src/
├── index.ts              # Bootstrap
├── app.ts                # Hono app factory
├── config.ts             # Environment config
├── routes/
│   ├── geocode.ts        # Forward + reverse endpoints with caching
│   └── health.ts
└── lib/
    ├── cache.ts          # LRU cache with TTL
    └── category-map.ts   # OSM → PlaceCategory mapping
pelias/
├── docker-compose.yml    # Pelias stack
├── pelias.json           # Pelias config (DACH region)
└── setup.sh              # Initial data import script