photon-cli

photon

Geocode places from the command line with Photon by Komoot.

photon is a single pure-Go binary. It searches 700M+ OpenStreetMap places, buildings, roads, and POIs over plain HTTPS and prints clean records that pipe into the rest of your tools. No API key, nothing to run alongside it.

The same package is also a resource-URI driver, so a host program like ant can address photon as photon:// URIs.

Install

go install github.com/tamnd/photon-cli/cmd/photon@latest

Or grab a prebuilt binary from the releases, or run the container image:

docker run --rm ghcr.io/tamnd/photon:latest --help

Usage

photon search "Paris"                       # forward geocoding
photon search "Eiffel Tower" -n 3           # limit results
photon search "coffee Berlin" --lang de     # language hint
photon reverse 48.8566 2.3522               # reverse geocoding
photon nearby "museum" --lat 48.85 --lon 2.35  # search near a point
photon --help                               # the whole command tree

Every command shares one output contract: -o table|json|jsonl|csv|tsv|url|raw, --fields to pick columns, --template for a custom line, and -n to limit. The default adapts to where output goes (a table on a terminal, JSONL in a pipe), so the same command reads well by hand and parses cleanly downstream.

Serve it

The same operations are available over HTTP and as an MCP tool set for agents, with no extra code:

photon serve --addr :7777    # GET /v1/page/<path>  returns NDJSON
photon mcp                   # speak MCP over stdio

Use it as a resource-URI driver

photon registers a photon domain the way a program registers a database driver with database/sql. A host enables it with one blank import:

import _ "github.com/tamnd/photon-cli/photon"

Then ant (or any program that links the package) dereferences photon:// URIs without knowing anything about photon:

ant ls photon://search/Paris       # forward search results
ant ls photon://nearby/coffee      # nearby places

Development

cmd/photon/   thin main: hands cli.NewApp to kit.Run
cli/                 assembles the kit App from the photon domain
photon/                the library: HTTP client, data models, and domain.go (the driver)
docs/                tago documentation site

make build      # ./bin/photon
make test       # go test ./...
make vet        # go vet ./...

Releasing

Push a version tag and GitHub Actions runs GoReleaser, which builds the archives, Linux packages, the multi-arch GHCR image, checksums, SBOMs, and a cosign signature:

git tag v0.1.0
git push --tags

The Homebrew and Scoop steps self-disable until their tokens exist, so the first release works with no extra secrets.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.