Troubleshooting Nominatim Installations🔗
Installation Issues🔗
Can a stopped/killed import process be resumed?🔗
"I accidentally killed the import process after it has been running for many hours. Can it be resumed?"
It is possible if the import already got to the indexing stage. Check the last line of output that was logged before the process was killed. If it looks like this:
Done 844 in 13 @ 64.923080 per second - Rank 26 ETA (seconds): 7.886255
then you can resume with the following command:
nominatim import --continue indexing
If the reported rank is 26 or higher, you can also safely add --index-noanalyse.
PostgreSQL crashed "invalid page in block"🔗
Usually serious problem, can be a hardware issue, not all data written to disc for example. Check PostgreSQL log file and search PostgreSQL issues/mailing list for hints.
If it happened during index creation you can try rerunning the step with
nominatim import --continue indexing
Otherwise it's best to start the full setup from the beginning.
nominatim.so version mismatch🔗
When running the import you may get a version mismatch:
COPY_END for place failed: ERROR: incompatible library "/srv/Nominatim/nominatim/build/module/nominatim.so": version mismatch
pg_config seems to use bad includes sometimes when multiple versions
of PostgreSQL are available in the system. Make sure you remove the
server development libraries (postgresql-server-dev-13 on Ubuntu)
and recompile (cmake .. && make).
I see the error "ERROR: permission denied for language c"🔗
nominatim.so, written in C, is required to be installed on the database
server. Some managed database (cloud) services like Amazon RDS do not allow
this. There is currently no work-around other than installing a database
on a non-managed machine.
I see the error: "function transliteration(text) does not exist"🔗
Reinstall the nominatim functions with nominatim refresh --functions
and check for any errors, e.g. a missing nominatim.so file.
I see the error: "ERROR: mmap (remap) failed"🔗
This may be a simple out-of-memory error. Try reducing the memory used
for --osm2pgsql-cache. Also make sure that overcommitting memory is
allowed: cat /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory should print 0 or 1.
If you are using a flatnode file, then it may also be that the underlying filesystem does not fully support 'mmap'. A notable candidate is virtualbox's vboxfs.
nominatim UPDATE failed: ERROR: buffer 179261 is not owned by resource owner Portal🔗
Several users reported this during the initial import of the database. It's something PostgreSQL internal Nominatim doesn't control. And PostgreSQL forums suggest it's threading related but definitely some kind of crash of a process. Users reported either rebooting the server, different hardware or just trying the import again worked.
The website shows: "Could not get word tokens"🔗
The server cannot access your database. Add &debug=1 to your URL
to get the full error message.
Website reports "DB Error: insufficient permissions"🔗
The user the webserver, e.g. Apache, runs under needs to have access to the
Nominatim database. You can find the user like
this,
for default Ubuntu operating system for example it's www-data.
-
Repeat the
createuserstep of the installation instructions. -
Give the user permission to existing tables
GRANT usage ON SCHEMA public TO "www-data";
GRANT SELECT ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO "www-data";
Website reports "Could not load library "nominatim.so"🔗
Example error message
SELECT make_standard_name('3039 E MEADOWLARK LN') [nativecode=ERROR: could not
load library "/srv/nominatim/Nominatim-3.1.0/build/module/nominatim.so":
/srv/nominatim/Nominatim-3.1.0/build/module/nominatim.so: cannot open shared
object file: Permission denied
CONTEXT: PL/pgSQL function make_standard_name(text) line 5 at assignment]
The PostgreSQL database, i.e. user postgres, needs to have access to that file.
The permission need to be read & executable by everybody, but not writeable by everybody, e.g.
-rwxr-xr-x 1 nominatim nominatim 297984 build/module/nominatim.so
Try chmod a+r nominatim.so; chmod a+x nominatim.so.
When you recently updated your operating system, updated PostgreSQL to
a new version or moved files (e.g. the build directory) you should
recreate nominatim.so. Try
cd build
rm -r module/
cmake $main_Nominatim_path && make
Setup fails with "DB Error: extension not found"🔗
Make sure you have the PostgreSQL extensions "hstore" and "postgis" installed. See the installation instructions for a full list of required packages.
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character🔗
Make sure that the operating system's locale is UTF-8. With some prebuilt images (e.g. LXC containers from Proxmox, see discussion) or images that optimize for size it might be missing.
On Ubuntu you can check the locale is installed:
grep UTF-8 /etc/default/locale
And install it using
dpkg-reconfigure locales
I forgot to delete the flatnodes file before starting an import.🔗
That's fine. For each import the flatnodes file get overwritten. See https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/52419/nominatim-flatnode-storage for more information.