This section provides a reference of all configuration parameters that can be used with Nominatim.

Configuring Nominatim

Nominatim uses dotenv to manage its configuration settings. There are two means to set configuration variables: through an .env configuration file or through an environment variable.

The .env configuration file needs to be placed into the project directory. It must contain configuration parameters in <parameter>=<value> format. Please refer to the dotenv documentation for details.

The configuration options may also be set in the form of shell environment variables. This is particularly useful, when you want to temporarily change a configuration option. For example, to force the replication serve to download the next change, you can temporarily disable the update interval:

NOMINATIM_REPLICATION_UPDATE_INTERVAL=0 nominatim replication --once

If a configuration option is defined through .env file and environment variable, then the latter takes precedence.

Configuration Parameter Reference

Import and Database Settings

NOMINATIM_DATABASE_DSN

Sets the connection parameters for the Nominatim database. At a minimum the name of the database (dbname) is required. You can set any additional parameter that is understood by libpq. See the Postgres documentation for a full list.

NOMINATIM_DATABASE_WEBUSER

Defines the name of the database user that will run search queries. Usually this is the user under which the webserver is executed. When running Nominatim via php-fpm, you can also define a separate query user. The Postgres user needs to be set up before starting the import.

Nominatim grants minimal rights to this user to all tables that are needed for running geocoding queries.

NOMINATIM_DATABASE_MODULE_PATH

Defines the directory in which the PostgreSQL server module nominatim.so is stored. The directory and module must be accessible by the PostgreSQL server.

For information on how to use this setting when working with external databases, see Advanced Installations.

The option is only used by the Legacy tokenizer and ignored otherwise.

NOMINATIM_TOKENIZER

Sets the tokenizer type to use for the import. For more information on available tokenizers and how they are configured, see Tokenizers.

NOMINATIM_TOKENIZER_CONFIG

Points to the file with additional configuration for the tokenizer. See the Tokenizer descriptions for details on the file format.

If a relative path is given, then the file is searched first relative to the project directory and then in the global settings directory.

NOMINATIM_MAX_WORD_FREQUENCY

The word frequency count is used by the Legacy tokenizer to automatically identify stop words. Any partial term that occurs more often then what is defined in this setting, is effectively ignored during search.

NOMINATIM_LIMIT_REINDEXING

Nominatim computes the address of each place at indexing time. This has the advantage to make search faster but also means that more objects needs to be invalidated when the data changes. For example, changing the name of the state of Florida would require recomputing every single address point in the state to make the new name searchable in conjunction with addresses.

Setting this option to 'yes' means that Nominatim skips reindexing of contained objects when the area becomes too large.

NOMINATIM_LANGUAGES

Normally Nominatim will include all language variants of name:XX in the search index. Set this to a comma separated list of language codes, to restrict import to a subset of languages.

Currently only affects the initial import of country names and special phrases.

NOMINATIM_TERM_NORMALIZATION

Special phrases have stricter matching requirements than normal search terms. They must appear exactly in the query after this term normalization has been applied.

Only has an effect on the Legacy tokenizer. For the ICU tokenizer the rules defined in the normalization section will be used.

NOMINATIM_USE_US_TIGER_DATA

When this setting is enabled, search and reverse queries also take data from Tiger house number data into account.

NOMINATIM_USE_AUX_LOCATION_DATA

When this setting is enabled, search queries also take data from external house number tables into account.

Warning: This feature is currently unmaintained and should not be used.

NOMINATIM_HTTP_PROXY

When this setting is enabled and at least NOMINATIM_HTTP_PROXY_HOST and NOMINATIM_HTTP_PROXY_PORT are set, the configured proxy will be used, when downloading external data like replication diffs.

NOMINATIM_HTTP_PROXY_HOST

When NOMINATIM_HTTP_PROXY is enabled, this setting configures the proxy host name.

NOMINATIM_HTTP_PROXY_PORT

When NOMINATIM_HTTP_PROXY is enabled, this setting configures the port number to use with the proxy.

NOMINATIM_HTTP_PROXY_LOGIN

When NOMINATIM_HTTP_PROXY is enabled, use this setting to define the username for proxies that require a login.

NOMINATIM_HTTP_PROXY_PASSWORD

When NOMINATIM_HTTP_PROXY is enabled, use this setting to define the password for proxies that require a login.

NOMINATIM_OSM2PGSQL_BINARY

Nominatim uses osm2pgsql to load the OSM data initially into the database. Nominatim comes bundled with a version of osm2pgsql that is guaranteed to be compatible. Use this setting to use a different binary instead. You should do this only when you know exactly what you are doing. If the osm2pgsql version is not compatible, then the result is undefined.

NOMINATIM_WIKIPEDIA_DATA_PATH

Set a custom location for the wikipedia ranking file. When unset, Nominatim expects the data to be saved in the project directory.

NOMINATIM_ADDRESS_LEVEL_CONFIG

The address level configuration defines the rank assignments for places. See Place Ranking for a detailed explanation what rank assignments are and what the configuration file must look like.

When a relative path is given, then the file is searched first relative to the project directory and then in the global settings directory.

NOMINATIM_IMPORT_STYLE

The style configuration describes which OSM objects and tags are taken into consideration for the search database. Nominatim comes with a set of pre-configured styles, that may be configured here.

You can also write your own custom style and point the setting to the file with the style. When a relative path is given, then the style file is searched first relative to the project directory and then in the global settings directory.

See Import Styles for more information on the available internal styles and the format of the configuration file.

NOMINATIM_FLATNODE_FILE

The osm2pgsql flatnode file is file that efficiently stores geographic location for OSM nodes. For larger imports it can significantly speed up the import. When this option is unset, then osm2pgsql uses a PsotgreSQL table to store the locations.

When a relative path is given, then the flatnode file is created/searched relative to the project directory.

NOMINATIM_TABLESPACE_*

Nominatim allows to distribute the search database over up to 10 different PostgreSQL tablespaces. If you use this option, make sure that the tablespaces exist before starting the import.

The available tablespace groups are:

NOMINATIM_TABLESPACE_SEARCH_DATA

Data used by the geocoding frontend.

NOMINATIM_TABLESPACE_SEARCH_INDEX

Indexes used by the geocoding frontend.

NOMINATIM_TABLESPACE_OSM_DATA

Raw OSM data cache used for import and updates.

NOMINATIM_TABLESPACE_OSM_DATA

Indexes on the raw OSM data cache.

NOMINATIM_TABLESPACE_PLACE_DATA

Data table with the pre-filtered but still unprocessed OSM data. Used only during imports and updates.

NOMINATIM_TABLESPACE_PLACE_INDEX

Indexes on raw data table. Used only during imports and updates.

NOMINATIM_TABLESPACE_ADDRESS_DATA

Data tables used for computing search terms and addresses of places during import and updates.

NOMINATIM_TABLESPACE_ADDRESS_INDEX

Indexes on the data tables for search term and address computation. Used only for import and updates.

NOMINATIM_TABLESPACE_AUX_DATA

Auxiliary data tables for non-OSM data, e.g. for Tiger house number data.

NOMINATIM_TABLESPACE_AUX_INDEX

Indexes on auxiliary data tables.

Replication Update Settings

NOMINATIM_REPLICATION_URL

Replication services deliver updates to OSM data. Use this setting to choose which replication service to use. See Updates for more information on how to set up regular updates.

NOMINATIM_REPLICATION_MAX_DIFF

At each update cycle Nominatim downloads diffs until either no more diffs are available on the server (i.e. the database is up-to-date) or the limit given in this setting is exceeded. Nominatim guarantees to downloads at least one diff, if one is available, no matter how small the setting.

The default for this setting is fairly conservative because Nominatim keeps all data downloaded in one cycle in RAM. Using large values in a production server may interfere badly with the search frontend because it evicts data from RAM that is needed for speedy answers to incoming requests. It is usually a better idea to keep this setting lower and run multiple update cycles to catch up with updates.

When catching up in non-production mode, for example after the initial import, the setting can easily be changed temporarily on the command line:

NOMINATIM_REPLICATION_MAX_DIFF=3000 nominatim replication

NOMINATIM_REPLICATION_UPDATE_INTERVAL

This setting determines when Nominatim will attempt to download again a new update. The time is computed from the publication date of the last diff downloaded. Setting this to a slightly higher value than the actual publication interval avoids unnecessary rechecks.

NOMINATIM_REPLICATION_RECHECK_INTERVAL

When replication updates are run in continuous mode (using nominatim replication), this setting determines how long Nominatim waits until it looks for updates again when updates were not available on the server.

Note that this is different from NOMINATIM_REPLICATION_UPDATE_INTERVAL. Nominatim will never attempt to query for new updates for UPDATE_INTERVAL seconds after the current database date. Only after the update interval has passed it asks for new data. If then no new data is found, it waits for RECHECK_INTERVAL seconds before it attempts again.

API Settings

NOMINATIM_CORS_NOACCESSCONTROL

When this setting is enabled, API HTTP responses include the HTTP CORS headers access-control-allow-origin: * and access-control-allow-methods: OPTIONS,GET.

NOMINATIM_MAPICON_URL

When a mapicon URL is configured, then Nominatim includes an additional icon field in the responses, pointing to an appropriate icon for the place type.

Map icons used to be included in Nominatim itself but now have moved to the nominatim-ui project. If you want the URL to be included in API responses, make the /mapicon directory of the project available under a public URL and point this setting to the directory.

NOMINATIM_DEFAULT_LANGUAGE

Nominatim localizes the place names in responses when the corresponding translation is available. Users can request a custom language setting through the HTTP accept-languages header or through the explicit parameter accept-languages. If neither is given, it falls back to this setting. If the setting is also empty, then the local languages (in OSM: the name tag without any language suffix) is used.

NOMINATIM_SEARCH_BATCH_MODE

This feature is currently undocumented and potentially broken.

NOMINATIM_SEARCH_NAME_ONLY_THRESHOLD

This setting defines the threshold over which a name is no longer considered as rare. When searching for places with rare names, only the name is used for place lookups. Otherwise the name and any address information is used.

This setting only has an effect after nominatim refresh --word-counts has been called to compute the word frequencies.

NOMINATIM_LOOKUP_MAX_COUNT

The /lookup point accepts list of ids to look up address details for. This setting restricts the number of places a user may look up with a single request.

NOMINATIM_POLYGON_OUTPUT_MAX_TYPES

Nominatim supports returning full geometries of places. The geometries may be requested in different formats with one of the polygon_* parameters. Use this setting to restrict the number of geometry types that may be requested with a single query.

Setting this parameter to 0 disables polygon output completely.

Logging Settings

NOMINATIM_LOG_DB

Enable logging requests into a database table with this setting. The logs can be found in the table new_query_log.

When using this logging method, it is advisable to set up a job that regularly clears out old logging information. Nominatim will not do that on its own.

Can be used as the same time as NOMINATIM_LOG_FILE.

NOMINATIM_LOG_FILE

Enable logging of requests into a file with this setting by setting the log file where to log to. A relative file name is assumed to be relative to the project directory.

The entries in the log file have the following format:

<request time> <execution time in s> <number of results> <type> "<query string>"

Request time is the time when the request was started. The execution time is given in ms and corresponds to the time the query took executing in PHP. type contains the name of the endpoint used.

Can be used as the same time as NOMINATIM_LOG_DB.