Basic Installation
This page contains generic installation instructions for Nominatim and its prerequisites. There are also step-by-step instructions available for the following operating systems:
These OS-specific instructions can also be found in executable form
in the vagrant/
directory.
Users have created instructions for other frameworks. We haven't tested those and can't offer support.
Prerequisites
Software
For compiling:
- cmake
- expat
- proj
- bzip2
- zlib
- ICU
- Boost libraries, including system and filesystem
- PostgreSQL client libraries
- a recent C++ compiler (gcc 5+ or Clang 3.8+)
For running Nominatim:
- PostgreSQL (9.5+ will work, 11+ strongly recommended)
- PostGIS (2.2+)
- Python 3 (3.5+)
- Psycopg2 (2.7+)
- Python Dotenv
- psutil
- Jinja2
- PyICU
- PHP (7.0 or later)
- PHP-pgsql
- PHP-intl (bundled with PHP)
- PHP-cgi (for running queries from the command line)
For running continuous updates:
For dependencies for running tests and building documentation, see the Development section.
Hardware
A minimum of 2GB of RAM is required or installation will fail. For a full planet import 64GB of RAM or more are strongly recommended. Do not report out of memory problems if you have less than 64GB RAM.
For a full planet install you will need at least 900GB of hard disk space. Take into account that the OSM database is growing fast. Fast disks are essential. Using NVME disks is recommended.
Even on a well configured machine the import of a full planet takes around 2 days. On traditional spinning disks, 7-8 days are more realistic.
Tuning the PostgreSQL database
You might want to tune your PostgreSQL installation so that the later steps
make best use of your hardware. You should tune the following parameters in
your postgresql.conf
file.
shared_buffers = 2GB
maintenance_work_mem = (10GB)
autovacuum_work_mem = 2GB
work_mem = (50MB)
effective_cache_size = (24GB)
synchronous_commit = off
checkpoint_segments = 100 # only for postgresql <= 9.4
max_wal_size = 1GB # postgresql > 9.4
checkpoint_timeout = 10min
checkpoint_completion_target = 0.9
The numbers in brackets behind some parameters seem to work fine for
64GB RAM machine. Adjust to your setup. A higher number for max_wal_size
means that PostgreSQL needs to run checkpoints less often but it does require
the additional space on your disk.
Autovacuum must not be switched off because it ensures that the tables are frequently analysed. If your machine has very little memory, you might consider setting:
autovacuum_max_workers = 1
and even reduce autovacuum_work_mem
further. This will reduce the amount
of memory that autovacuum takes away from the import process.
For the initial import, you should also set:
fsync = off
full_page_writes = off
Don't forget to reenable them after the initial import or you risk database corruption.
Downloading and building Nominatim
Downloading the latest release
You can download the latest release from nominatim.org. The release contains all necessary files. Just unpack it.
Downloading the latest development version
If you want to install latest development version from github, make sure to also check out the osm2pgsql subproject:
git clone --recursive git://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim.git
The development version does not include the country grid. Download it separately:
wget -O Nominatim/data/country_osm_grid.sql.gz https://www.nominatim.org/data/country_grid.sql.gz
Building Nominatim
The code must be built in a separate directory. Create the directory and change into it.
mkdir build
cd build
Nominatim uses cmake and make for building. Assuming that you have created the build at the same level as the Nominatim source directory run:
cmake ../Nominatim
make
sudo make install
Nominatim installs itself into /usr/local
per default. To choose a different
installation directory add -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<install root>
to the
cmake command. Make sure that the bin
directory is available in your path
in that case, e.g.
export PATH=<install root>/bin:$PATH
Now continue with importing the database.