Waystones Designer · Getting started
Overview
The Waystones designer is a free, open-source tool for modelling geodata and generating OGC API and WMS deployments.
The Waystones designer is a free, open-source web app (AGPL-3.0) for shaping geodata into a well-described data model, then publishing it as OGC API Features, WMS, vector tiles and STAC. It runs in your browser — your data stays on your machine until you choose to publish.
Use it when you want more control than a straight GeoPackage upload gives you:
- Model your data. Layers, fields, codelists, constraints, inheritance between layers and shared types.
- Describe it well. Rich metadata — license, contact, INSPIRE theme, update frequency, temporal extent — with an optional AI assistant (Claude or Gemini) to draft descriptions and keywords.
- Style it. A style editor whose styles carry over to WMS and vector tiles.
- Connect databases. Import a schema from PostGIS or Supabase and choose which tables to publish.
- Version it. Push models to GitHub, review diffs and open pull requests.
Ways to publish
| Target | What you get |
|---|---|
| Waystones Cloud | Fully managed hosting — no Docker or infrastructure. Use Open in Waystones Cloud at the end of Quick Publish. |
| Deployment kit | A self-contained kit with Docker Compose, Railway or GitHub Codespaces configuration, running oapif-go and QGIS Server on your own infrastructure. |
Either way, source data is converted once to GeoParquet and FlatGeobuf and served from there, so services don't hold open database connections.
Get started
Open waystones.app — no account needed. Choose Publish data to start from a GeoPackage, Connect & Deploy for PostGIS or Supabase, or Work with model to open or create a model.
No data at hand? Try the sample under the drop zone loads Natural Earth countries and populated places (public domain) and takes you straight into Quick Publish.
Open a model from a link
Add ?model= and a URL to open a model or dataset directly:
https://waystones.app/?model=https://example.com/roads.model.json
The link can point to a Waystones model (.json, .yaml), a GeoPackage, GeoJSON, or an OGC API /collections response. The file must be publicly reachable and allow cross-origin requests (CORS) — raw GitHub URLs and public S3/R2 buckets work. Opening the same model link twice shows your existing copy rather than adding a duplicate.
The source code is on GitHub.