orbat-mapper

Building orders of battle on a map

ORBAT Mapper is a client side web application for constructing orders of battle, the ORBATs that list a force's units and their command structure, and for plotting where those units sit on a map. The stated goal is to let someone recreate historic battles and military scenarios directly in a browser. The project describes itself as work in progress, and a current version is available to try at orbat-mapper.app, with documentation hosted at docs.orbat-mapper.app. Because the code is open source under the MIT license, anyone may use, change, and pass the source along, provided they follow the license conditions. The authors note that the project changes quickly, so a fork adapted for your own use should expect churn. The emphasis on being a static, client side application matters for how it is deployed: there is no server component to run, which keeps the barrier to trying it low. A screenshot in the README shows a sample of the in progress interface, and the framing is practical rather than promotional, focused on letting a user place units and build a believable order of battle without specialized GIS tooling. The open source license is what makes the project usable for teaching and for personal history projects without asking permission. A user who wants a specific battle can build it once and share the result, and the client side design means there is no account or server to manage before the first unit is placed.

Running it locally

Getting the app running on your own machine follows a familiar front end workflow. You clone the repository, change into the project root, and install dependencies with pnpm install. A development server starts with pnpm run dev and serves the app on http://localhost:5173, with Vite pushing source changes to the browser as you edit. When you want a production build, pnpm run build writes an optimized and minified bundle to the dist directory, and pnpm run preview serves that build locally. The README also documents a standalone build through pnpm run build:singlefile, which produces one HTML file that runs from disk without a web server. For people who would rather not build at all, each release publishes an orbat-mapper zip meant for a web server and an orbat-mapper-standalone HTML file meant to run on its own. The deployment options point to the standard Vite static deploy guide. This range of build outputs is the practical core of the project: you can host it, hand someone a folder, or email a single file, and the experience stays the same because all of the logic lives in the client. The single file build is the option that travels best, since it needs no server and no install step to open. For a classroom or a demo machine that may be wiped, handing someone one HTML file is far simpler than walking them through a package install and a dev server on their laptop.

Offline and deployment options

Because ORBAT Mapper is a static client side application, it can work without an internet connection, but only once you tell it where to find map data. The README lays out three ways to do this. The first is self hosted: you serve the application from your own web server and the map data from your own tile server. The second is a local map file: you serve the application from a web server but read the basemap from a PMTiles archive stored on disk. The third is the standalone file: you run the single HTML file from disk alongside a PMTiles archive on disk. One caveat is called out plainly: the place name search sends requests to Photon, a hosted geocoder, and that function needs internet access in all three cases with no offline replacement. The releases page supplies both the web server zip and the standalone HTML so you can pick the form that fits your situation. The documentation covers the full instructions, the configuration of basemap layers, and the limits of each offline option. The README also notes that an older OpenLayers map is deprecated and should not be used for new work, though it remains reachable at a legacy route.

Editorial conclusion

ORBAT Mapper is an MIT licensed client side web application built with TypeScript and Vite, and each release ships a standalone single HTML file.