Crestr

I'm Abdul, an 18-year-old solo developer building Crestr, a full-stack hiking web app aimed to allow others to make hiking routes, import their own routes, or export their made routes via GPX or GeoJSON for free.

Crestr features a fast UK and Ireland wide routing via BRouter (https://brouter.de) and GPX import/export (tested end-to-end with Garmin devices). It's fully open source and built to be self-hosted, with Docker Compose deployment, Caddy + TLS, and versioned releases for anyone who wants to run their own instance.

Where donations go

Server costs.

Crestr runs on a Hetzner VPS with TLS, self-hosted analytics (Umami), backups, and health monitoring. Donations go towards keeping the hosted app running reliably.

Any surplus beyond the month's server costs goes towards a fund for the next month's costs and so on and so on. This may be re-evaluated when income from donations become more substantial

Why it matters to me

Crestr started as a personal project and has grown into something I want to keep improving properly. Initially when I began I knew very little in professional software development, though over time I have learnt to adopt such development (conventional commits, PRs, test passes before releases). Crestr also matters to me as it provides genuine usefulness for people who hike and cannot afford subscriptions, such as myself, and/or want control over their own routing data rather than relying on closed platforms.

If you find the project useful, want to support open-source hiking tools, or just want to help keep the project running a donation would go a long way.

Thank you.

• Code: github.com/abdlfc11/Crestr-Hiking-App
• Docs: docs.crestr.co.uk