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Install Nominatim in a virtual machine for development and testing

This document describes how you can install Nominatim inside a Ubuntu 24 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.

Prerequisites

  1. Virtualbox

  2. Vagrant

  3. Nominatim

     git clone https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim.git

Installation

  1. Start the virtual machine

     vagrant up ubuntu24-nginx

  2. Log into the virtual machine

     vagrant ssh ubuntu24-nginx

  3. 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

Development

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.

Use the functions of the log() object to create temporary debug output. Add &debug=1 to the URL to see the output.

In the Python BDD test you can use logger.info() for temporary debug statements.

For more information on running tests, see https://nominatim.org/release-docs/develop/develop/Testing/

FAQ

Will it run on Windows?

Yes, Vagrant and Virtualbox can be installed on MS Windows just fine. You need a 64bit version of Windows.

Will it run on Apple Silicon?

You might need to replace Virtualbox with Parallels. There is no free/open source version of Parallels.

Why Monaco, can I use another country?

Of course! The Monaco import takes less than 10 minutes and works with 2GB RAM.

Will the results be the same as those from nominatim.openstreetmap.org?

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.

Why Ubuntu? Can I test CentOS/Fedora/CoreOS/FreeBSD?

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.

How can I connect to an existing database?

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

My computer is slow and the import takes too long. Can I start the virtual machine "in the cloud"?

Yes. It's possible to start the virtual machine on Amazon AWS (plugin) or DigitalOcean (plugin).