This week we have released Nominatim 4.3.1, the first bug fix release in the new 4.3 release series.

With the 4.3 release, you can now try out Nominatim’s new Python frontend. It comes with an updated search algorithm and for the first time allows direct access to the search database through a Python library. The frontend is still marked as experimental because the new search algorithm still need some tuning and the library API may see some smaller changes in the next months. You are still encouraged to try it out. The code runs stable and is production-ready, as is visible on nominatim.openstreetmap.org. Please note that there are some smaller differences between the old PHP version for the web API.

With this release, Nominatim switches from using its own custom osm2pgsql plugin to using the standard osm2pgsql flex output. If you use one of the default styles, this transition will be automatic. If you are working with a custom style, you need to change to the flex lua format soon. The former osm2pgsql gazetteer output is now deprecated and support will be removed completely in version 5.0.

Updating from any 4.x.x version to the new release is straightforward. Please follow the instructions from the migration guide. Updating from older versions is possible but not recommended. Please note that the migration to 4.3.0 requires building a new index needed by the frontend. It is therefore not recommended to migrate while a machine is in active use.

Many thanks to everybody who contributed to this release: @biswajit-k, @miku0, @alfmarcua, @woodpeck, @bloom256, @n-timofeev, @t-tomek and to NGI Zero for the financial support.