Nominatim/VAGRANT.md

Install Nominatim in a virtual machine for development and testing

This document describes how you can install Nominatim inside a Ubuntu 14 virtual machine on your desktop/laptop (host machine). The goal is to give you a development environment to easily edit code and run the test suite without affecting the rest of your system.

The installation can run largely unsupervised. You should expect 1-2h from start to finish depending on how fast your computer and download speed is.

Prerequisites

1. Virtualbox

2. Vagrant

3. Nominatim

    git clone --recursive https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim.git
   

   If you haven't used --recursive, then you can load the submodules using

    git submodule init
    git submodule update
   

Installation

1. Start the virtual machine

    vagrant up ubuntu
   

2. Log into the virtual machine

    vagrant ssh ubuntu
   

3. Import a small country (Monaco)

   You need to give the virtual machine more memory (2GB) for an import, see Vagrantfile. Otherwise 1GB is enough.

   See the FAQ how to skip this step and point Nominatim to an existing database.

   # inside the virtual machine:
   mkdir data
   cd build
   wget --no-verbose --output-document=../data/monaco.osm.pbf http://download.geofabrik.de/europe/monaco-latest.osm.pbf
   ./utils/setup.php --osm-file ../data/monaco.osm.pbf --osm2pgsql-cache 1000 --all 2>&1 | tee monaco.$$.log
   

   To repeat an import you'd need to delete the database first

    dropdb -if-exists nominatim
   

Development

Vagrant maps the virtual machine's port 8089 to your host machine. Thus you can see Nominatim in action on locahost:8089.

You edit code on your host machine in any editor you like. There is no need to restart any software: just refresh your browser window.

PHP errors are written to /var/log/apache2/error.log.

With echo and var_dump() you write into the output (HTML/XML/JSON) when you either add &debug=1 to the URL (preferred) or set @define('CONST_Debug', true); in settings/local.php.

Running functional tests

Tests in /features/db and /features/osm2pgsql have to pass 100%. Other tests might require full planet-wide data. Sadly even if you have your own planet-wide data there will be enough differences to the openstreetmap.org installation to cause false positives in the other tests (see FAQ).

To run the full test suite

cd ~/Nominatim/tests
NOMINATIM_SERVER=http://localhost:8089/nominatim lettuce features

To run a single file

NOMINATIM_SERVER=http://localhost:8089/nominatim lettuce features/api/reverse.feature

To run specific tests you can add tags just before the Scenario line, e.g.

@bug-34
Scenario: address lookup for non-existing or invalid node, way, relation

and then

NOMINATIM_SERVER=http://localhost:8089/nominatim lettuce -t bug-34

Running unit tests

cd ~/Nominatim/tests-php
phpunit ./

FAQ

Will it run on Windows?

Yes, Vagrant and Virtualbox can be installed on MS Windows just fine. You need a 64bit version of Windows.

Why Monaco, can I use another country?

Of course! The Monaco import takes less than 30 minutes and works with 2GB RAM.

Will the results be the same as those from nominatim.openstreetmap.org?

No. Long running Nominatim installations will differ once new import features (or bug fixes) get added since those usually only get applied to new/changed data.

Also this document skips the optional Wikipedia data import which affects ranking of search results. See Nominatim installation for details.

Why Ubuntu and CentOS, can I test CentOS/CoreOS/FreeBSD?

There is a Vagrant script for CentOS available. Simply start your box with vagrant up centos and then log in with vagrant ssh centos. In general Nominatim will also run in the other environments. The installation steps are slightly different, e.g. the name of the package manager, Apache2 package name, location of files. We chose Ubuntu because that is closest to the nominatim.openstreetmap.org production environment.

You can configure/download other Vagrant boxes from vagrantbox.es.

How can I connect to an existing database?

Let's say you have a Postgres database named nominatim_it on server your-server.com and port 5432. The Postgres username is postgres. You can edit settings/local.php and point Nominatim to it.

pgsql://postgres@your-server.com:5432/nominatim_it

No data import necessary, no restarting necessary.

If the Postgres installation is behind a firewall, you can try

ssh -L 9999:localhost:5432 your-username@your-server.com

inside the virtual machine. It will map the port to localhost:9999 and then you edit settings/local.php with

pgsql://postgres@localhost:9999/nominatim_it

To access postgres directly remember to specify the hostname, e.g. psql --host localhost --port 9999 nominatim_it

My computer is slow and the import takes too long. Can I start the virtual machine "in the cloud"?

Yes. It's possible to start the virtual machine on Amazon AWS (plugin) or DigitalOcean (plugin).