We are happy to announce the release of Nominatim 5.0.0. This major release marks the end of a 4-year journey to modernize and modularize the Nominatim codebase in order to make it easier to use and maintain.

This release finishes the mutation of Nominatim into a Python package. The PHP frontend, bundled osm2pgsql and cmake build scripts have now been removed for good. If you are still using one of these features, then you should update your software to Nominatim 4.5 and then move to the new Python frontend and pip installation. Once done, you can easily update to the latest version 5 release.

Also in this release, the osm2pgsql import style configuration has been largely be rewritten. If you are using one of the built-in styles, this will not make much of a difference. If you are maintaining your own custom style, however, this should become much easier. Most notable, it is now possible to start with one of the existing styles and add your customizations on top. That should make it much easier to keep in sync with the latest changes in Nominatim. Have a look at the updated documentation for details. The new implementation is largely backwards compatible, so your old scripts will keep working for now.

With the new osm2pgsql style implementation comes the ability to use Nominatim together with osm2pgsql-themepark. This comes in handy when you want to combine Nominatim with other osm2pgsql flex styles in order to host OSM data for different purposes in the same database. Check out the updated cookbook about how to run Nominatim with osm-carto to learn how to use this feature.

Finally, Nominatim has a new hook for adding pre-processing functions for incoming search queries, allowing to apply custom filtering. The first filter to use this new functionality breaks up Japanese addresses into their parts.

A full list of changes can as always be found in the Changelog.