Placemark

Placemark is an open source[^1] and free application for creating, viewing, editing, and analyzing map data. Most people who want to use this application should visit Placemark.io, the main instance. The rest of this README is for people who want to tinker with it as a developer, fork it, etc.

Getting started

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.

This repository expects you to use pnpm and Node 24.5.0, which can be installed using mise or manually.

git clone
pnpm install

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

3. Configure 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>" \

4. Start the server:

Either in development mode with hot-reloading:

pnpm dev

Or build a dist/ directory that you can serve as normal files:

pnpm build
pnpm dlx serve@latest dist

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

[^1]: With the narrow exception, right now, of Mapbox GL JS, which has a restrictive license. We have plans to migrate to maplibre-gl, an open-source fork of Mapbox GL JS (unfortunately, funded primarily by US tech oligopolies like Microsoft) when there's time.