1 # Install Nominatim in a virtual machine for development and testing
3 This document describes how you can install Nominatim inside a Ubuntu 22
4 virtual machine on your desktop/laptop (host machine). The goal is to give
5 you a development environment to easily edit code and run the test suite
6 without affecting the rest of your system.
8 The installation can run largely unsupervised. You should expect 1h from
9 start to finish depending on how fast your computer and download speed
14 1. [Virtualbox](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads)
16 2. [Vagrant](https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html)
20 git clone --recursive https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim.git
22 If you forgot `--recursive`, it you can later load the submodules using
31 1. Start the virtual machine
35 2. Log into the virtual machine
39 3. Import a small country (Monaco)
41 See the FAQ how to skip this step and point Nominatim to an existing database.
44 # inside the virtual machine:
46 wget --no-verbose --output-document=monaco.osm.pbf http://download.geofabrik.de/europe/monaco-latest.osm.pbf
47 nominatim import --osm-file monaco.osm.pbf 2>&1 | tee monaco.$$.log
50 To repeat an import you'd need to delete the database first
52 dropdb --if-exists nominatim
58 Vagrant maps the virtual machine's port 8089 to your host machine. Thus you can
59 see Nominatim in action on [localhost:8089](http://localhost:8089/nominatim/).
61 You edit code on your host machine in any editor you like. There is no need to
62 restart any software: just refresh your browser window.
64 Note that the webserver uses files from the /build directory. If you change
65 files in Nominatim/website or Nominatim/utils for example you first need to
66 copy them into the /build directory by running the `cmake` step from the
69 PHP errors are written to `/var/log/apache2/error.log`.
71 With `echo` and `var_dump()` you write into the output (HTML/XML/JSON) when
72 you either add `&debug=1` to the URL.
74 In the Python BDD test you can use `logger.info()` for temporary debug
81 cd ~/Nominatim/tests/php
85 ## Running PHP code style tests
91 ## Running functional tests
93 Tests in `test/bdd/db` and `test/bdd/osm2pgsql` have to pass 100%. Other
94 tests might require full planet-wide data. Sadly even if you have your own
95 planet-wide data there will be enough differences to the openstreetmap.org
96 installation to cause false positives in the other tests (see FAQ).
98 To run the full test suite
100 cd ~/Nominatim/test/bdd
101 behave -DBUILDDIR=/home/vagrant/build/ db osm2pgsql
105 behave -DBUILDDIR=/home/vagrant/build/ api/lookup/simple.feature
107 Or a single test by line number
109 behave -DBUILDDIR=/home/vagrant/build/ api/lookup/simple.feature:34
111 To run specific groups of tests you can add tags just before the `Scenario line`, e.g.
114 Scenario: address lookup for non-existing or invalid node, way, relation
118 behave -DBUILDDIR=/home/vagrant/build/ --tags @bug-34
127 ##### Will it run on Windows?
129 Yes, Vagrant and Virtualbox can be installed on MS Windows just fine. You need a 64bit
132 ##### Will it run on Apple Silicon?
134 You might need to replace Virtualbox with [Parallels](https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/).
135 There is no free/open source version of Parallels.
137 ##### Why Monaco, can I use another country?
139 Of course! The Monaco import takes less than 30 minutes and works with 2GB RAM.
141 ##### Will the results be the same as those from nominatim.openstreetmap.org?
143 No. Long running Nominatim installations will differ once new import features (or
144 bug fixes) get added since those usually only get applied to new/changed data.
146 Also this document skips the optional Wikipedia data import which affects ranking
147 of search results. See [Nominatim installation](https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/admin/Installation)
150 ##### Why Ubuntu? Can I test CentOS/Fedora/CoreOS/FreeBSD?
152 There used to be a Vagrant script for CentOS available, but the Nominatim directory
153 isn't symlinked/mounted to the host which makes development trickier. We used
154 it mainly for debugging installation with SELinux.
156 In general Nominatim will run in the other environments. The installation steps
157 are slightly different, e.g. the name of the package manager, Apache2 package
158 name, location of files. We chose Ubuntu because that is closest to the
159 nominatim.openstreetmap.org production environment.
161 You can configure/download other Vagrant boxes from
162 [https://app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search](https://app.vagrantup.com/boxes/search).
164 ##### How can I connect to an existing database?
166 Let's say you have a Postgres database named `nominatim_it` on server `your-server.com`
167 and port `5432`. The Postgres username is `postgres`. You can edit the `.env` in your
168 project directory and point Nominatim to it.
170 NOMINATIM_DATABASE_DSN="pgsql:host=your-server.com;port=5432;user=postgres;dbname=nominatim_it
172 No data import or restarting necessary.
174 If the Postgres installation is behind a firewall, you can try
176 ssh -L 9999:localhost:5432 your-username@your-server.com
178 inside the virtual machine. It will map the port to `localhost:9999` and then
179 you edit `.env` file with
181 NOMINATIM_DATABASE_DSN="pgsql:host=localhost;port=9999;user=postgres;dbname=nominatim_it"
183 To access postgres directly remember to specify the hostname,
184 e.g. `psql --host localhost --port 9999 nominatim_it`
187 ##### My computer is slow and the import takes too long. Can I start the virtual machine "in the cloud"?
189 Yes. It's possible to start the virtual machine on [Amazon AWS (plugin)](https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws)
190 or [DigitalOcean (plugin)](https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean).