Crestr

I'm Abdul, an 18-year-old solo developer building Crestr, a full-stack hiking web app focused on GPX routes and elevation-aware pathfinding. It's been in development for around two years and is currently in Beta release.

Crestr features a custom A* pathfinding engine with KDTree spatial lookups, elevation-aware routing, offline routing modes, 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

1. Server costs first. Crestr runs on a Hetzner VPS with TLS, self-hosted analytics (Umami), backups, and health monitoring. Donations go towards keeping the hosted beta running reliably.
2. My time, if costs are covered. Any surplus beyond hosting goes towards supporting the time I put into building and maintaining Crestr as I balance this with starting a Computer Science degree.

Why it matters to me

Crestr started as a personal project and has grown into something I want to keep improving properly, sound architecture, disciplined development (conventional commits, PRs, test passes before releases), and genuine usefulness for people who hike and 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 lights on for a solo dev's side project, thank you.

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