Overview

Barrelman is the self-hosted OSM search and spatial engine that powers Parchment's place search, category lookup, and spatial queries. It runs as a set of Docker containers and communicates with Parchment over HTTP.

Source: github.com/alexwohlbruck/barrelman

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What Barrelman provides

Barrelman ingests an OSM PBF extract from Geofabrik into PostGIS and exposes a REST API for:

• Text + semantic search — full-text, fuzzy, abbreviation, and vector search layers
• Nearby search — find places within a radius, filtered by category
• Spatial containment — find parent areas (city/county/state) for a point
• Children lookup — list POIs inside a venue or area (e.g. shops inside a mall)
• Place detail — fetch a single OSM element by type + ID

Parchment's BarrelmanIntegration handles all communication and maps responses to Parchment's unified Place model.

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Services

All images are published to Docker Hub / GHCR. No build step is required — docker compose up -d pulls everything automatically.

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Getting started

1. Set up Barrelman — create a config directory, write .env, and start the containers
2. Import OSM data — download a region and build the search indexes
3. Connect to Parchment — configure the integration through the Settings UI