OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine)

OSRM, the Open Source Routing Machine, is a routing engine written in C++ that finds shortest paths in road networks built from OpenStreetMap data.^1,2 Profiles for car, bicycle and walking come with it and can be customised.¹ Routes across a continent-sized network take milliseconds, by the project's account.¹ It is free and open source under the two-clause BSD licence and is maintained by its community.^1,2 The paper to cite is Luxen and Vetter, "Real-time routing with OpenStreetMap data", from the 2011 ACM SIGSPATIAL conference.² Version 26.10.0 was released on 1 October 2026.³

Six services are reached through an HTTP API, a C++ library, and Node.js and Python bindings.² Nearest snaps a point to the street network, route finds the fastest route between points, and table gives travel times or distances between every pair of a set of points.² Match fits a noisy GPS trace to the roads, trip solves the travelling salesman problem with a greedy heuristic, and tile serves vector tiles carrying routing data.² To run your own, you download an OpenStreetMap extract, for example from Geofabrik, prepare it with a profile and serve it with osrm-routed; Docker images are provided.² Preparation can be slow: a 550.7 MB extract of Mexico took about 30 minutes to extract.²

Two kinds of public server are available for light use. The project's demo server has its own usage policy.² FOSSGIS e.V. runs routing.openstreetmap.de on OSRM v5.27.1, with worldwide car, bike and foot routing on its own profiles.⁴ Its data is refreshed roughly every two days.⁴ Its usage policy asks for the OpenStreetMap attribution and a link to "fix the map", a user agent that identifies the application and a referrer where possible, no more than one request per second, and no scraping or heavy use.^4,5 Commercial use is allowed only where the service is not a substantial part of an online offering, high-traffic websites are generally not permitted, each service runs on a single server with no guarantee of availability, and permission can be revoked at any time.⁵ The policy points those who need more to the guide for installing OSRM themselves.⁵

For a model of a place, the table service gives travel times by road, bike or on foot between, say, every home in a district and its nearest clinics or schools, and match places recorded GPS traces on the streets they followed.²