Because I don't think a lot of people know about it, I'll mention pelias here. If you have 16 GB RAM and 600 GB of disk, you can have a free, open source, pre-populated geo database that covers the entire planet.
Pelias does geocoding (turns addresses, POIs, and administrative regions into coordinates), reverse geocoding (given coordinates, finds nearby POIs, addresses, neighborhood, city, county, state, country), full-text search, and autocompletion. You can also import CSV to use your own custom data.
I run it on an extra PC, where it powers about 20 twitter bots that turn lat/lon coordinates of aircraft into descriptions like "flying over Silver Lake, Los Angeles, 0.5 miles from Circus Liquor."
Co-maintainer of Pelias here so I'll chime in with some more background info.
Pelias came out of Mapzen which (sadly) shut down about 3 years ago, but we had a great team of people working on it for 4 years before that, and the project has continued to grow since then. We have contributions from my company, Geocode Earth, which I plugged in another thread so I won't repeat, other contributors like Jawg(https://www.jawg.io/), and of course individuals and teams from many other places.
The core architecture uses Elasticsearch, Node.js, SQLite and some Go to build a fully featured, modular geocoder.
Geocoding is both a fascinating and incredibly frustrating challenge so we are always looking for more people reporting bugs and contributing fixes or other improvements. We truly believe a quality geocoder can't be built outside the large bankrolls of Google, etc without growing a strong open-source community around it.
Pelias is great, I ran it + open route service + a custom router all on one server for 30€ a month + a few other non maps related services. It made for a surprisingly coherent maps experience.
Yes, for example the north-america docker project says "As a fairly large build, this will require significant resources to complete quickly. It can still run on a personal computer with 8GB+ RAM, but will take a while. It will require 300GB or so of disk space."
That's not really comparable. It's kind of like saying you can have a self-hosted search engine by using Elasticsearch. The devil is in the data and details.
https://github.com/pelias/pelias
Pelias does geocoding (turns addresses, POIs, and administrative regions into coordinates), reverse geocoding (given coordinates, finds nearby POIs, addresses, neighborhood, city, county, state, country), full-text search, and autocompletion. You can also import CSV to use your own custom data.
I run it on an extra PC, where it powers about 20 twitter bots that turn lat/lon coordinates of aircraft into descriptions like "flying over Silver Lake, Los Angeles, 0.5 miles from Circus Liquor."
There are docker configs for the whole-planet DB as well as various countries or metro areas if you don't need the whole Earth. https://github.com/pelias/docker/tree/master/projects