This document describes how you can install Nominatim inside a Ubuntu 22 virtual machine on your desktop/laptop (host machine). The goal is to give you a development environment to easily edit code and run the test suite without affecting the rest of your system.
The installation can run largely unsupervised. You should expect 1h from start to finish depending on how fast your computer and download speed is.
-
Nominatim
git clone --recursive https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim.git
If you forgot
--recursive
, it you can later load the submodules usinggit submodule init git submodule update
-
Start the virtual machine
vagrant up ubuntu
-
Log into the virtual machine
vagrant ssh ubuntu
-
Import a small country (Monaco)
See the FAQ how to skip this step and point Nominatim to an existing database.
# inside the virtual machine: cd nominatim-project wget --no-verbose --output-document=monaco.osm.pbf http://download.geofabrik.de/europe/monaco-latest.osm.pbf nominatim import --osm-file monaco.osm.pbf 2>&1 | tee monaco.$$.log
To repeat an import you'd need to delete the database first
dropdb --if-exists nominatim
Vagrant maps the virtual machine's port 8089 to your host machine. Thus you can see Nominatim in action on localhost:8089.
You edit code on your host machine in any editor you like. There is no need to restart any software: just refresh your browser window.
Note that the webserver uses files from the /build directory. If you change
files in Nominatim/website or Nominatim/utils for example you first need to
copy them into the /build directory by running the cmake
step from the
installation.
PHP errors are written to /var/log/apache2/error.log
.
With echo
and var_dump()
you write into the output (HTML/XML/JSON) when
you either add &debug=1
to the URL.
In the Python BDD test you can use logger.info()
for temporary debug
statements.
cd ~/Nominatim/tests/php
phpunit ./
cd ~/Nominatim
phpcs --colors .
Tests in test/bdd/db
and test/bdd/osm2pgsql
have to pass 100%. Other
tests might require full planet-wide data. Sadly even if you have your own
planet-wide data there will be enough differences to the openstreetmap.org
installation to cause false positives in the other tests (see FAQ).
To run the full test suite
cd ~/Nominatim/test/bdd
behave -DBUILDDIR=/home/vagrant/build/ db osm2pgsql
To run a single file
behave -DBUILDDIR=/home/vagrant/build/ api/lookup/simple.feature
Or a single test by line number
behave -DBUILDDIR=/home/vagrant/build/ api/lookup/simple.feature:34
To run specific groups of tests you can add tags just before the Scenario line
, e.g.
@bug-34
Scenario: address lookup for non-existing or invalid node, way, relation
and then
behave -DBUILDDIR=/home/vagrant/build/ --tags @bug-34
Yes, Vagrant and Virtualbox can be installed on MS Windows just fine. You need a 64bit version of Windows.
You might need to replace Virtualbox with Parallels. There is no free/open source version of Parallels.
Of course! The Monaco import takes less than 30 minutes and works with 2GB RAM.
No. Long running Nominatim installations will differ once new import features (or bug fixes) get added since those usually only get applied to new/changed data.
Also this document skips the optional Wikipedia data import which affects ranking of search results. See Nominatim installation for details.
There used to be a Vagrant script for CentOS available, but the Nominatim directory isn't symlinked/mounted to the host which makes development trickier. We used it mainly for debugging installation with SELinux.
In general Nominatim will run in the other environments. The installation steps are slightly different, e.g. the name of the package manager, Apache2 package name, location of files. We chose Ubuntu because that is closest to the nominatim.openstreetmap.org production environment.
You can configure/download other Vagrant boxes from https://app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search.
Let's say you have a Postgres database named nominatim_it
on server your-server.com
and port 5432
. The Postgres username is postgres
. You can edit the .env
in your
project directory and point Nominatim to it.
NOMINATIM_DATABASE_DSN="pgsql:host=your-server.com;port=5432;user=postgres;dbname=nominatim_it
No data import or restarting necessary.
If the Postgres installation is behind a firewall, you can try
ssh -L 9999:localhost:5432 [email protected]
inside the virtual machine. It will map the port to localhost:9999
and then
you edit .env
file with
NOMINATIM_DATABASE_DSN="pgsql:host=localhost;port=9999;user=postgres;dbname=nominatim_it"
To access postgres directly remember to specify the hostname,
e.g. psql --host localhost --port 9999 nominatim_it
Yes. It's possible to start the virtual machine on Amazon AWS (plugin) or DigitalOcean (plugin).