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Setting up Nominatim for Development

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

Important

This guide assumes you develop under the latest version of Debian/Ubuntu. You can of course also use your favourite distribution. You just might have to adapt the commands below slightly, in particular the commands for installing additional software.

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 can be started via nominatim serve is sufficient.

If you want to run Nominatim in a VM via Vagrant, use the default ubuntu24 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 for PHP code and pytest for Python code). It has the following additional requirements:

For testing the Python search frontend, you need to install extra dependencies depending on your choice of webserver framework:

The documentation is built with mkdocs:

Installing prerequisites on Ubuntu/Debian

The Python tools should always be run with the most recent version. In particular, pylint tends to have a lot of breaking changes between versions. The easiest way, to handle these Python dependencies is to run your development from within a virtual environment.

To set up the virtual environment with all necessary packages run:

virtualenv ~/nominatim-dev-venv
~/nominatim-dev-venv/bin/pip install\
    psycopg2-binary psutil psycopg[binary] PyICU SQLAlchemy \
    python-dotenv jinja2 pyYAML datrie \
    behave mkdocs mkdocstrings pytest pytest-asyncio pylint \
    types-jinja2 types-markupsafe types-psutil types-psycopg2 \
    types-pygments types-pyyaml types-requests types-ujson \
    types-urllib3 typing-extensions unicorn falcon

Now enter the virtual environment whenever you want to develop:

. ~/nominatim-dev-venv/bin/activate

For installing the PHP development tools, run:

sudo apt install php-cgi phpunit php-codesniffer

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:

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

Running Nominatim during development

The source code for Nominatim can be found in the src directory and can be run in-place. The source directory features a special script nominatim-cli.py which does the same as the installed 'nominatim' binary but executes against the code in the source tree. For example:

me@machine:~$ cd Nominatim
me@machine:~Nominatim$ ./nominatim-cli.py --version
Nominatim version 4.4.99-1

Make sure you have activated the virtual environment holding all necessary dependencies.

Executing Tests

All tests are located in the /test directory.

To run all tests, run make from the source root:

make tests

There are also make targets for executing only parts of the test suite. For example to run linting only use:

make lint

The possible testing targets are: mypy, lint, pytest, bdd.

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> make serve-doc
[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> PYTHONPATH=$SRCDIR mkdocs serve --dev-addr 0.0.0.0:8088
[server:296] Serving on http://0.0.0.0:8088
[handlers:62] Start watching changes