In our mission to make Nominatim easier to install and use, there are two more features we are working on for the next release: making Nominatim installable and adding automatic migrations.

Anybody who has tried to set up their own Nominatim import has probably noticed that Nominatim needs to be run in-place: download and unpack the source code and run everything from there. That is admittedly a comfortable arrangement for a developer but less so for a user that just wants to run their own Nominatim service.

To make Nominatim an installable software like any other, it was necessary to first cleanly separate the parts in the code that are generically usable from those that are tied to a specific Nominatim database import. The latter part obviously includes configuration files and optional extra data like postcodes. In addition, there are parts of the code which are strongly tied to the specific import. The most prominent example is the custom PostgreSQL normalisation module that ships with Nominatim. The next release introduces the notion of a project directory, a directory that collects all the data used for one specific import.

With the import-specific data out of the way the remainder of the code can then be installed in standard OS locations with nominatim tool providing all the commands for manipulating your database and project directory.

Installation is one part, another important part is upgrading the software. Every new version of Nominatim brings some changes of the database schema. To be able to update to a newer software version without having to endure days of reimporting the database, migrations are needed: instructions how to get from an old database schema to a new one without a reimport. In previous releases, we have usually provided documentation how to migrate to newer versions manually. Starting with the next release, this tedious task will be taken over by a new migration command. Not only will this make the work easier for database administrators, it also means that we can think about more complicated changes to the database schema in the future. As long as a migration is provided, anything is possible.