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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 running Nominatim:

Furthermore the following Python libraries are required:

These will be installed automatically when using pip installation.

For running continuous updates:

For running the Python frontend:

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 128GB 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 1TB 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 2.5 days. When using traditional SSDs, 4-5 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)
synchronous_commit = off
max_wal_size = 1GB
checkpoint_timeout = 60min
checkpoint_completion_target = 0.9
random_page_cost = 1.0
wal_level = minimal
max_wal_senders = 0

The numbers in brackets behind some parameters seem to work fine for 128GB 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.

Installing the latest release🔗

Nominatim is easiest installed directly from Pypi. Make sure you have installed osm2pgsql, PostgreSQL/PostGIS and libICU together with its header files.

Then you can install Nominatim with:

pip install nominatim-db nominatim-api

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:

git clone https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim.git

The development version does not include the country grid. Download it separately:

wget -O Nominatim/data/country_osm_grid.sql.gz https://nominatim.org/data/country_grid.sql.gz

Building Nominatim🔗

Nominatim is easiest to run from its own virtual environment. To create one, run:

sudo apt-get install virtualenv
virtualenv /srv/nominatim-venv

To install Nominatim directly from the source tree into the virtual environment, run:

/srv/nominatim-venv/bin/pip install packaging/nominatim-{db,api}

Now continue with importing the database.