Barrelman
Self-hosted OSM search and spatial engine for Parchment.
Barrelman is a self-hosted OSM geospatial engine that powers Parchment's place search, category lookup, and spatial queries. It is the recommended search provider for installations that want fast, private, offline-capable OSM search.
See the Barrelman setup guide for instructions on running and importing data into Barrelman.
Capabilities
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Search | Full-text, fuzzy, abbreviation, and vector search over OSM places |
| Autocomplete | Low-latency typeahead backed by the same search pipeline |
| Search Category | Browse places by OSM preset category (e.g. amenity/cafe) |
| Geocoding | Address-to-coordinate lookup and reverse geocoding of a dropped pin |
| Place Info | Fetch a single place by OSM type + ID |
| Spatial Contains | Find which named areas contain a given coordinate |
| Spatial Children | List POIs whose centroids fall inside a given area |
| Transit | Live vehicle positions, route shapes and topology, stop departures, and station detail from GTFS + GTFS-RT feeds |
| Shared mobility | Bikeshare and scooter dock availability from GBFS feeds |
| Isochrones | Travel-time reachability polygons for walking, cycling, driving, and public transit — used by the map's isochrone tool |
Barrelman has the highest priority of any geocoding provider, so it serves geocoding whenever it is configured. Reverse geocoding returns the feature at the coordinate hydrated with its full OSM geometry and tags, borrowing the street address the geocoder found at the same spot when the feature has none of its own. If nothing addressable is nearby, it falls back to the smallest administrative area containing the point.
Providers configured below Barrelman — Nominatim, Google Maps, Geoapify — remain as fallbacks for coordinates outside the regions you have imported.
Configuration
In Settings → Integrations, click the settings icon on the Barrelman card.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Host | Base URL of your Barrelman instance, e.g. http://localhost:5001. For a publicly deployed instance use the HTTPS URL (e.g. https://barrelman.example.com). |
| API Key | The value of BARRELMAN_API_KEY set in Barrelman's .env. Leave blank if no key is configured. |
Click Test Connection before saving to confirm Parchment can reach your Barrelman instance.