We are happy to announce the release of version 4.5.0 of Nominatim. This is a transition release, helping you to prepare the move towards the upcoming Nominatim 5.0, which will be a pure Python application.

The most important change in this release is that Nominatim is now available via pypi.org and can be installed with a simple pip install nominatim-db nominatim-api. We had to change the package structure slightly to make this possible, splitting the nominatim package into two parts: nominatim-db (the database importer) and nominatim-api (the search frontend). Please carefully read the migration guide about how this change might affect you. The old way of installing with CMake is still available in this release. So you can take your time updating to the new installation method. Nominatim 5 will then only be installable via pip.

Other new features in this release include the possibility to customize API output for web installations, a streamlined file format for wiki importances, improvements to ordering results according to how well address parts match and a more consistent assignment of countries in disputed areas. A more complete list of changes can be found in the Changelog.

This is the last release to have support for PostgreSQL 9.6 and 10 and Postgis 2.x. These version have long gone out of support, so it is time to drop them.

Furthermore, the following Nominatim features will be removed with the next release:

  • PHP frontend. Please switch to the newer Python frontend instead.
  • Legacy tokenizer. If your database still uses this tokenizer, you need to reimport using the ICU tokenizer.
  • Installation via CMake. Switch to using pip install instead.
  • Bundeling of osm2pgsql. Use a stock osm2pgsql version 1.8 or higher. Ubuntu 24.04 and Debian >= 11 have appropriate packages. The packages of older Ubuntu version are too old and you need to compile a newer osm2pgsql from source.