Open-source npm package @olism/bd-geo brings structured Bangladesh geographic data to JS and TypeScript

A developer has published @olism/bd-geo, an open-source package on npm that packages Bangladesh's administrative geography as structured data for JavaScript and TypeScript projects. Announced in a post on dev.to, the library covers the country's location hierarchy from the division level down to individual villages.

What the data covers

According to the announcement, the package models five levels of Bangladeshi geography: divisions, districts, upazilas and thanas, areas, and villages. Because these levels nest inside one another, the data maps naturally onto cascading selectors — choose a division, then one of its districts, then an upazila or thana, and finally an area or village. The author positions this as an alternative to the familiar routine of hunting for a dataset, tidying it up and keeping it current — work that has traditionally been repeated inside every project that needed it.

Installation and availability

The package is available from npm and can be added to a project with a single command using either npm or yarn. Because it targets both JavaScript and TypeScript, the geographic structures can be consumed with type information rather than parsed as ad-hoc JSON. Development takes place in a public GitHub repository, where the source is open to inspection and contribution.

Where it fits

The dev.to post points at a broad set of use cases: address and location forms, e-commerce and delivery systems, real-estate listings, location-based features, database seeding, data visualisation, and location search or filtering. What unites them is the need for a dependable division-to-locality cascade, which is exactly the shape the library exposes. An address form, for instance, can walk a user down the hierarchy step by step instead of asking them to type a locality name freehand.

An early-stage project

The author is open about the project's maturity, noting that the dataset, APIs, documentation and overall developer experience all still need work. Feedback, bug reports and contributions are explicitly invited, and developers building Bangladesh-focused applications are encouraged to suggest additional datasets or features they would find useful.

Why it matters

Country-specific reference data is a recurring hidden cost in application development. Teams building for Bangladesh have often resorted to copying location tables from spreadsheets, older repositories or scraped sources, and then carrying the maintenance burden alone. Distributing the data as a versioned npm module changes that economics: corrections become dependency updates, the structure stays consistent across projects, and TypeScript users gain compile-time certainty about the shape of what they are consuming.

It is also a small instance of a wider trend — national and regional datasets being shipped through ordinary package registries rather than as one-off downloads. Whether this particular package succeeds will depend on the same thing that sustains any open dataset: contributors keeping it accurate as administrative boundaries evolve. In the meantime, it lowers the barrier for any JavaScript or TypeScript application that needs to ask a user in Bangladesh where they live.