1 # Setting up Nominatim for Development
3 This chapter gives an overview how to set up Nominatim for development
7 This guide assumes you develop under the latest version of Debian/Ubuntu.
8 You can of course also use your favourite distribution. You just might have
9 to adapt the commands below slightly, in particular the commands for
10 installing additional software.
12 ## Installing Nominatim
14 The first step is to install Nominatim itself. Please follow the installation
15 instructions in the [Admin section](../admin/Installation.md). You don't need
16 to set up a webserver for development, the webserver that can be started
17 via `nominatim serve` is sufficient.
19 If you want to run Nominatim in a VM via Vagrant, use the default `ubuntu24` setup.
20 Vagrant's libvirt provider runs out-of-the-box under Ubuntu. You also need to
21 install an NFS daemon to enable directory sharing between host and guest. The
22 following packages should get you started:
24 sudo apt install vagrant vagrant-libvirt libvirt-daemon nfs-kernel-server
26 ## Prerequisites for testing and documentation
28 The Nominatim test suite consists of behavioural tests (using pytest-bdd) and
29 unit tests (using pytest). It has the following additional requirements:
31 * [flake8](https://flake8.pycqa.org/en/stable/) (CI always runs the latest version from pip)
32 * [mypy](http://mypy-lang.org/) (plus typing information for external libs)
33 * [Python Typing Extensions](https://github.com/python/typing_extensions) (for Python < 3.9)
34 * [pytest](https://pytest.org)
35 * [pytest-asyncio](https://pytest-asyncio.readthedocs.io)
36 * [pytest-bdd](https://pytest-bdd.readthedocs.io)
38 For testing the Python search frontend, you need to install extra dependencies
39 depending on your choice of webserver framework:
41 * [httpx](https://www.python-httpx.org/) (Starlette only)
42 * [asgi-lifespan](https://github.com/florimondmanca/asgi-lifespan) (Starlette only)
44 The documentation is built with mkdocs:
46 * [mkdocs](https://www.mkdocs.org/) >= 1.1.2
47 * [mkdocstrings](https://mkdocstrings.github.io/) >= 0.25
48 * [mkdocs-material](https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/)
49 * [mkdocs-gen-files](https://oprypin.github.io/mkdocs-gen-files/)
52 ### Installing prerequisites on Ubuntu/Debian
54 The Python tools should always be run with the most recent version.
55 The easiest way, to handle these Python dependencies is to run your
56 development from within a virtual environment.
59 sudo apt install build-essential libsqlite3-mod-spatialite osm2pgsql \
60 postgresql-postgis postgresql-postgis-scripts \
61 pkg-config libicu-dev virtualenv
66 Create a virtual environment and install all dependencies:
69 virtualenv ~/nominatim-dev-venv
70 . ~/nominatim-dev-venv/bin/activate
71 pip install --group runtime --group dev .
74 To install dependencies individually:
78 packaging/nominatim-db packaging/nominatim-api \
79 pytest pytest-asyncio pytest-bdd flake8 mypy \
80 mkdocs mkdocstrings mkdocs-gen-files mkdocs-material \
81 osmium aiosqlite falcon starlette uvicorn \
82 types-jinja2 types-markupsafe types-psutil types-psycopg2 \
83 types-pygments types-pyyaml types-requests types-ujson types-urllib3 typing-extensions
88 If you prefer, you can use [uv](https://docs.astral.sh/uv/) for a faster
89 development setup. Install uv following the
90 [official instructions](https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/),
91 then from the Nominatim source directory:
97 This creates a virtual environment and installs all Python dependencies
98 automatically. To run commands in the environment:
101 uv run nominatim --version
102 uv run pytest test/python
106 ### Running Nominatim during development
108 The source code for Nominatim can be found in the `src` directory and can
109 be run in-place. The source directory features a special script
110 `nominatim-cli.py` which does the same as the installed 'nominatim' binary
111 but executes against the code in the source tree. For example:
114 me@machine:~$ cd Nominatim
115 me@machine:~Nominatim$ ./nominatim-cli.py --version
116 Nominatim version 5.1.0-0
119 Make sure you have activated the virtual environment holding all
120 necessary dependencies.
124 All tests are located in the `/test` directory.
126 To run all tests, run make from the source root:
132 There are also make targets for executing only parts of the test suite.
133 For example to run linting only use:
139 The possible testing targets are: mypy, lint, pytest, bdd.
141 For more information about the structure of the tests and how to change and
142 extend the test suite, see the [Testing chapter](Testing.md).
144 ## Documentation Pages
146 The [Nominatim documentation](https://nominatim.org/release-docs/develop/) is
147 built using the [MkDocs](https://www.mkdocs.org/) static site generation
148 framework. The master branch is automatically deployed every night on
149 [https://nominatim.org/release-docs/develop/](https://nominatim.org/release-docs/develop/)
151 To build the documentation run
158 For local testing, you can start webserver:
161 build> make serve-doc
162 [server:296] Serving on http://127.0.0.1:8000
163 [handlers:62] Start watching changes
166 If you develop inside a Vagrant virtual machine, use a port that is forwarded
170 build> mkdocs serve --dev-addr 0.0.0.0:8088
171 [server:296] Serving on http://0.0.0.0:8088
172 [handlers:62] Start watching changes