24.07.2025 | Frederik Ramm
The Geofabrik dowload server is a wildly popular service that pushes out about 400 TB of OpenStreetMap data to users around the world – most of that in the form of country or regional .osm.pbf files. We publish these files with a date in the filename (e.g. germany-250723.osm.pbf) but for convenience we also have a downloadable file like “germany-latest.osm.pbf” that always gives you the most recent version.
Keeping these two as separate files does, however, interfere with caching; the proxies we use to speed up the download offering don’t know that “something-250723” and “something-latest” are the same file so they need to retrieve them both.
Starting 01 September, we’ll change this in line with best practices, and send a HTTP redirect if you request a “latest” file. The redirect then points the client to the appropriate URL with a data embedded in the file name. This should be transparent for most use cases, however if you have some sort of setup that does not follow HTTP redirects you might have to modify that. wget will follow redirects by default, whereas curl requires the command line flag -L.
