We’re thrilled to announce the release of openrouteservice (ors) version 8.0, designated “Wilfried”, as a tribute to Prof. Dr. Wilfried Juling, whose steady support and advice fundamentally shaped the growth and success of HeiGIT since its beginning.
With countless hours and dedication poured into development and innovation, we’re excited to present a rich set of new features, enhancements, and fixes:
Changes
- Configuration overhaul: Openrouteservice can now be configured by a much cleaner YAML configuration and/or entirely by environment variables. We provide a configuration migration tool to convert old JSON config to new YAML config.
- New Docker Compose Setup: A key upgrade is now available after overhauling the 6+ years old docker and docker compose setup. Enjoy a complete new experience with proper container logging, clear documentation, enhanced container mount permissions, singular mount points, small images, jar deployment and much, much more. Give it a go! See the project’s README for a quick, or the backend documentation for a detailed explanation.
New Features
- Option to Build War or FatJar: Flexibility at your fingertips with the option to build war or fatJar.
- Vitepress-docs: Seamlessly navigate through our completely reworked and overhauled documentation with the new Vitepress-docs Home | openrouteservice backend documentation.
- Norwegian Language Support: Expand your user experience with the latest Norwegian language support.
- Low RAM Configuration: Enjoy improved memory requirements with the latest memory mapping functionality that lets you run large graphs on small RAM.
- Cloud Native Images: We’re excited to announce that our latest docker images benefit from an extremely small size of just 238.23 MB and the reworked configuration. You can now configure the images without any config files, just by using environment variables and environment files, which makes it ready to be run in any imaginable container environment.
- Improved Logging in openrouteservice: Also, our ors application itself got a logging revamp and is now providing a better than ever look into its internals. Through new configuration methods, you can now fine-tune logging for individual parts of ors.
Fixes and Enhancements
We have implemented roughly 25 fixes and enhancements, with the following two being of broader interest for users.
- Performance Enhancement for Isochrones: We optimized the creation of isochrones and fast-isochrones, which allows us now to create isochrone geometries faster and with more detail. Enjoy!
While the old isochrones (blue) could rather easily break in areas with low graph information, the new isochrones (red) are generally more stable towards these break points and provide faster and more coherent geometries.
- Security Fixes: By keeping our dependencies up to date, we’ve reached a security score of A on sonar cloud with 0 vulnerabilities.
These are just highlights from a vast array of improvements, fixes, and enhancements included in openrouteservice 8.0. For a detailed list, please refer to our complete changelog. We hope you’ll like this release as much as we do. In case you have questions running ors v8 or just want to let us know what you think about our work, you’re welcome to let us know across our communication channels:
- Our user forum for quick and uncomplicated support and discussions: openrouteservice
- Our issue board on GitHub for bugs and errors: GitHub Issue Board
As always, we believe that our goals are best reached by providing our work free, open source and with fair licences and that the transparent and public interaction with our users is the basis of providing good software.
Thank you to all our contributors and users for making this release possible. To keep up with future developments and releases related to openrouteservice as well as other efforts to advance geospatial technology in the mobility, humanitarian aid, and data analytics space, follow the social media channels and stay up to date on our blog.
Sincerely,
Your Smart Mobility Team at HeiGIT gGmbH (Heidelberg Institute of Geoinformation Technology).
Happy routing!