CARTO started stamping "API KEY REQUIRED" across every keyless basemap tile
on 26.08.2026. #2060 added a key field as the immediate answer, but it leaves
a self-hosted instance needing an email exchange with CARTO before its maps
look right, and every default in the client still pointed at CARTO. Default
to OpenFreeMap Positron instead: no key, no account, no request limit,
commercial use allowed, attribution required.
OpenFreeMap serves vector tiles only, so the Leaflet basemap is a MapLibre
style document rather than an XYZ template. maplibre-gl-leaflet hangs a GL
canvas into Leaflet's own tile pane, which leaves everything above it alone -
markers, GeoJSON, clusters, plugin layers, the custom panes, and the click
handling, since Leaflet's CSS already puts pointer-events:none on that layer.
maplibre-gl still arrives only through a dynamic import, so no chunk that
draws a map grows by a megabyte.
Switched: the trip planner, the MapView fallback every preview goes through,
the journey map, collections, the atlas, the shared trip page and the offline
tile prefetch. OpenFreeMap Positron and Bright join the tile presets in
settings, the admin defaults and both mobile screens.
A CARTO template that is already saved keeps working when a key backs it -
that stays a supported choice. Without a key it is not drawn at all:
resolveTileUrl falls back to the default rather than to a watermark, so an
instance that upgrades with one in its settings sees the new basemap
immediately and needs no migration. The stored value is left as it is, so the
Map settings tab still shows what was chosen and the warning underneath it
explains why - one sentence appended, in all 23 locales.
OpenFreeMap asks for a credit of its own; OpenStreetMap alone under its tiles
is wrong and a licence problem. attributionForTile() derives it from the URL
rather than from a flag at each call site, and the shared trip map, which
carried no attribution at all, now gets one.
Offline maps keep working and get cheaper. A vector style is four things
instead of one, so sync/glPrefetcher.ts walks the style document, its sprite,
the Latin glyph ranges of each font stack it uses, the TileJSON - the planet
path is versioned, so guessing it answers 200 with an empty body - and then
the .pbf tiles. Over the Berlin bounding box TREK computes, raster z10-16 is
2237 requests and 34.6 MB and gives up above z16; vector z10-14 is 177
requests and 32.1 MB and stays sharp above that, because MapLibre scales the
z14 tile rather than asking for another. The Workbox rule for
tiles.openfreemap.org moves to CacheFirst and shares the prefetcher's cache,
so browsing tops a downloaded region up instead of filling a second copy
beside it - a versioned tile path can never be stale. Clearing offline maps
clears it too.
The atlas loses its second raster layer. It existed to warm the HTTP cache of
neighbouring zoom levels, which a vector basemap does not need; a second one
would only cost a second WebGL context. OpenFreeMap has no label-free style,
so its labels are switched off on the live map instead - they are all symbol
layers, while borders and coastlines are line and fill - re-armed on
style.load so a theme switch keeps them off.
Theme changes call setStyle in place rather than rebuilding the layer: a swap
per toggle would leak a WebGL context, and browsers cap those in the low
teens.
CARTO stamps an "API KEY REQUIRED" watermark onto every basemap tile
fetched without a key since 26.08.2026, and both CartoDB presets plus the
built-in fallback are CARTO. The key is free and needs no account, so add
it as a setting rather than dropping the provider.
carto_api_key sits next to mapbox_access_token: per user in Settings/Map,
instance-wide under Admin/User Defaults, encrypted at rest, injected from
CARTO_API_KEY on managed instances. Unlike Mapbox it never switches the
map provider, since a raster key says nothing about the renderer.
The key is appended as ?key= at render time instead of being stored in the
template, so a saved URL stays portable and survives a rotation. That is
also what reaches the four maps that pinned CARTO and ignored the user's
tile setting: atlas, collections, the public trip share and the public
journey. The two share pages read it from their token-gated payload, the
same way baseCurrency already travels.
Also lifts the release notice above page chrome. Its overlay sat at
z-index 50, under the Vacay mode toolbar at 61, so the dialog was neither
on top nor modal. Adds a six-step layer scale to index.css and moves the
three notice shells onto it.
Closes#2054Closes#2052
The a/b/c shards stopped being necessary in 2022 and d has since lost its
DNS record. The map never asked for d — Leaflet defaults to abc — but the
offline prefetcher rotated over a to d, which is where the failing requests
came from, and it cached most tiles under a host the map never requests.
Presets and the prefetcher use the apex host now. A URL already saved in
user_settings is rewritten where it is read and written back, so existing
instances heal without a migration touching what someone typed themselves.
The CSP only allowed https://*.tile.openstreetmap.org, and a wildcard host
never matches the apex domain, so the prefetch fetch would have been blocked.
The service worker rule had the same gap and would have stopped filling the
tile cache.
A1phaN