🌱 PlantedMaps

Find vegan restaurants near you on a live map — one Expo / React Native codebase running on Web, iOS and Android. Open source, privacy-first, and built to be self-hosted: spin up your own vegan map for your city, region or community.

Live at plantedmaps.com · built by Nyx & Fabian · part of Open Cosmic Software.

Why it's different

• 🔒 Privacy by design. Routing happens on your device — the server never sees where you are. There is no location tracking, no per-user analytics, no ad SDKs.
• 📊 Radically transparent. A public, anonymous live dashboard at /dashboard shows exactly what we count: a daily tally of searches and restaurant views. No IPs, no coordinates, no users, no sessions — the daily_stats table literally has three columns: date, event, count.
• 🌍 Real data. Live OpenStreetMap diet:vegan restaurants via the Overpass API (no key needed).
• 🧩 One codebase, three platforms. Web (Leaflet) and native (react-native-maps) behind one shared interface.

Accounts (JWT), favorites that sync across devices, a fully-vegan / vegan-options filter, "near me" geolocation, map ⇄ list view, restaurant detail pages, and crawlable per-restaurant SEO pages.

Platforms — one codebase

	Engine
iOS / Android	react-native-maps (Apple Maps on iOS, Google Maps on Android)
Web	Leaflet + OpenStreetMap

The map is a single component with platform-specific implementations (components/AppMap.native.tsx / AppMap.web.tsx) behind one shared interface — Metro resolves the right one per platform automatically.

Stack

• Expo SDK 56 + expo-router (file-based routing, tabs)
• TypeScript (strict)
• react-native-maps (native) / Leaflet (web)
• expo-location (geolocation), AsyncStorage (token)
• Overpass API for live diet:vegan restaurant data (no key)
• Backend: Express + better-sqlite3 + JWT (server/)

Self-hosting

1. Backend

cd server
npm install
cp .env.example .env        # then edit .env — at minimum set JWT_SECRET
npm start                   # listens on $PORT (default 5050)

The only thing you need is a JWT_SECRET (for accounts). Everything else in .env.example is optional — geocoding (Stadia Maps), email verification (Mailgun), Google Places enrichment, text-to-speech. The restaurant data itself comes from the keyless Overpass API, so the map works out of the box.

The SQLite database is created automatically at DATABASE_PATH (default ./data.db). Visit http://localhost:5050/dashboard to see your own anonymous usage stats.

2. App

npm install
# point the app at your backend:
EXPO_PUBLIC_API_URL=http://localhost:5050 npm run web      # Web
npm run ios        # iOS  (needs macOS / Xcode, or Expo Go)
npm run android    # Android (needs Android Studio, or Expo Go)

For Android native maps, add a Google Maps key to app.json → android.config.googleMaps.apiKey.

Reverse proxy

Behind Caddy / nginx, route /api/*, /r/*, /dashboard and the /sitemap*.xml paths to the backend; serve the built web app for everything else.

API

Method	Path	Notes
POST	/api/auth/register · /api/auth/login	accounts
GET	/api/auth/me	current user
GET POST DELETE	/api/favorites[/:id]	saved spots (synced)
GET POST DELETE	/api/reviews[/:id]	restaurant reviews
GET	/api/places?bbox=s,w,n,e&strict=true	vegan restaurants in a bbox
GET	/api/stats	anonymous aggregate counts
GET	/dashboard	public privacy-first stats page
GET	/r/{en|de}/<slug>	crawlable restaurant SEO page

Privacy promise

We count that things happen, never who or where. When you search the map, the bounding box is used to fetch results and then discarded — it is never stored. Routing is computed on your device. The only persistent analytics is a per-day, per-event integer. That's the whole point. 🦞

License

MIT © 2026 Open Cosmic Software (Nyx & Fabian). See LICENSE.