Setting up Nominatim for Development

This chapter gives an overview how to set up Nominatim for developement and how to run tests.

Installing Nominatim

The first step is to install Nominatim itself. Please follow the installation instructions in the Admin section. You don't need to set up a webserver for development, the webserver that is included with PHP is sufficient.

If you want to run Nominatim in a VM via Vagrant, use the default ubuntu setup. Vagrant's libvirt provider runs out-of-the-box under Ubuntu. You also need to install an NFS daemon to enable directory sharing between host and guest. The following packages should get you started:

sudo apt install vagrant vagrant-libvirt libvirt-daemon nfs-kernel-server

Prerequisites for testing and documentation

The Nominatim test suite consists of behavioural tests (using behave) and unit tests (using PHPUnit). It has the following additional requirements:

• behave test framework >= 1.2.5
• nose
• phpunit >= 7.3
• PHP CodeSniffer

The documentation is built with mkdocs:

• mkdocs >= 1.1.2

Installing prerequisites on Ubuntu/Debian

Some of the Python packages require the newest version which is not yet available with the current distributions. Therefore it is recommended to install pip to get the newest versions.

To install all necessary packages run:

sudo apt install php-cgi phpunit php-codesniffer \
                 python3-pip python3-setuptools python3-dev

pip3 install --user behave nose mkdocs

The mkdocs executable will be located in .local/bin. You may have to add this directory to your path, for example by running:

echo 'export PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH' > ~/.profile

If your distribution does not have PHPUnit 7.3+, you can install it (as well as CodeSniffer) via composer:

sudo apt-get install composer
composer global require "squizlabs/php_codesniffer=*"
composer global require "phpunit/phpunit=8.*"

The binaries are found in .config/composer/vendor/bin. You need to add this to your PATH as well:

echo 'export PATH=~/.config/composer/vendor/bin:$PATH' > ~/.profile

Executing Tests

All tests are located in the \test directory.

Preparing the test database

Some of the behavioural test expect a test database to be present. You need at least 2GB RAM and 10GB disk space to create the database.

First create a separate directory for the test DB and fetch the test planet data and the Tiger data for South Dakota:

mkdir testdb
cd testdb
wget https://www.nominatim.org/data/test/nominatim-api-testdata.pbf
wget -O - https://nominatim.org/data/tiger2018-nominatim-preprocessed.tar.gz | tar xz --wildcards --no-anchored '46*'

Configure and build Nominatim in the usual way:

cmake $USERNAME/Nominatim
make

Copy the test settings:

cp $USERNAME/Nominatim/test/testdb/local.php settings/

Inspect the file to check that all settings are correct for your local setup.

Now you can import the test database:

dropdb --if-exists test_api_nominatim
./utils/setup.php --all --osm-file nominatim-api-testdb.pbf 2>&1 | tee import.log
./utils/specialphrases.php --wiki-import | psql -d test_api_nominatim 2>&1 | tee -a import.log
./utils/setup.php --import-tiger-data 2>&1 | tee -a import.log

Running the tests

To run all tests just go to the test directory and run make:

cd test
make

To skip tests that require the test database, run make no-test-db instead.

For more information about the structure of the tests and how to change and extend the test suite, see the Testing chapter.

Documentation Pages

The Nominatim documentation is built using the MkDocs static site generation framework. The master branch is automatically deployed every night on https://nominatim.org/release-docs/develop/

To build the documentation, go to the build directory and run

make doc
INFO - Cleaning site directory
INFO - Building documentation to directory: /home/vagrant/build/site-html

This runs mkdocs build plus extra transformation of some files and adds symlinks (see CMakeLists.txt for the exact steps).

Now you can start webserver for local testing

build> mkdocs serve
[server:296] Serving on http://127.0.0.1:8000
[handlers:62] Start watching changes

If you develop inside a Vagrant virtual machine, use a port that is forwarded to your host:

build> mkdocs serve --dev-addr 0.0.0.0:8088
[server:296] Serving on http://0.0.0.0:8088
[handlers:62] Start watching changes