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brouter

BRouter, the offline router QMapShack runs for hiking, bike and car routes with elevation

  • Version recorded: 1.7.10
  • Categories: navigation-maps
  • Upstream: https://github.com/abrensch/brouter
  • Needs first: default-jre-headless
  • Needs Java: 11 or newer — read with java -version at plan time (a metapackage's version does not say which Java it brings); deferred from a profile on a machine below it, refused by name, nothing fetched to meet it

What it does

Installs BRouter, an offline route planner for walking, hiking, cycling and driving, under /usr/local/share/hammunition/brouter/. QMapShack runs it for you as a local router, on this machine only, over the routing files brouter-segments builds from your map regions. Its 26 routing profiles include hiking-mountain, which reads how hard a trail is (sac_scale), trekking, mountain-bike and gravel profiles, and car profiles; its routes carry elevation, climbs and voice hints.

Why you would want it

Routino, the other router here, treats an alpine scramble like a footpath and ignores hills. BRouter weighs trail difficulty and climbs, so a hiking or bike route goes where you would actually go. It is the offline alternative to BRouter's own website and to phone apps that stop working with the phone network.

Before it will work

Java (default-jre-headless, installed with it). Routing files from brouter-segments, which needs your map regions set in station config. Start QMapShack from the qmapshack-offline launcher, which registers this BRouter in QMapShack's settings, then choose BRouter in QMapShack's Routing dock.

How it installs

  • prebuilt zip from https://github.com/abrensch/brouter/releases/download/v1.7.10/brouter-1.7.10.zip
  • Lands whole under /usr/local/share/hammunition/brouter/. QMapShack's BRouter setup reads the jar and profiles2/lookups.dat from there.

What it changes on your machine

  • installed tree — /usr/local/share/hammunition/brouter is created and handed to the operator who ran the install by an explicit chown step in the plan (D-043): the software keeps settings, logs or data beside its executable, so the tree has to be writable by whoever runs it. On a shared machine that means anyone who can act as that user can change what the launcher runs.
  • /usr/local/share/hammunition stays root-owned; the tree itself is replaced whole on every install, so anything the software wrote inside it is lost then
  • undo: hammunition uninstall brouter removes the tree

Known problems

QMapShack's own BRouter setup wizard downloads BRouter and its routing files from brouter.de; do not use it for this install. brouter.de's routing files are rebuilt weekly and published with no checksum of any kind, which is why Hammunition never fetches them and builds its own. QMapShack's About text calls BRouter GPLv3; upstream's licence is MIT. Not yet confirmed on hardware: a route drawn by QMapShack through this BRouter. It was run by hand on the development host with routing files the engine built from synthetic regions, and it routed.

Keeping it current

  • probe: github release (abrensch/brouter)
  • strategy: reinstall
  • A few releases a year. A new release is a new zip: download it, check its sha256 against GitHub's asset digest, bump the URL, the digest, the tree marker (the jar is named by version) and version. The routing files are rebuilt on the next install, because their record names the jar they were built with.

Where to get help with the software itself

The project's GitHub issues; the profile language is documented in profiles2/readme.txt and on https://brouter.de/brouter/.

Source: catalog/packages/brouter.yaml