1 # Importing and Updating the Database
3 The following instructions explain how to create a Nominatim database
4 from an OSM planet file and how to keep the database up to date. It
5 is assumed that you have already successfully installed the Nominatim
6 software itself, if not return to the [installation page](Installation.md).
8 ## Configuration setup in settings/local.php
10 The Nominatim server can be customized via the file `settings/local.php`
11 in the build directory. Note that this is a PHP file, so it must always
16 without any leading spaces.
18 There are lots of configuration settings you can tweak. Have a look
19 at `settings/default.php` for a full list. Most should have a sensible default.
23 If you plan to import a large dataset (e.g. Europe, North America, planet),
24 you should also enable flatnode storage of node locations. With this
25 setting enabled, node coordinates are stored in a simple file instead
26 of the database. This will save you import time and disk storage.
27 Add to your `settings/local.php`:
29 @define('CONST_Osm2pgsql_Flatnode_File', '/path/to/flatnode.file');
31 Replace the second part with a suitable path on your system and make sure
32 the directory exists. There should be at least 40GB of free space.
34 ## Downloading additional data
36 ### Wikipedia rankings
38 Wikipedia can be used as an optional auxiliary data source to help indicate
39 the importance of osm features. Nominatim will work without this information
40 but it will improve the quality of the results if this is installed.
41 This data is available as a binary download:
43 cd $NOMINATIM_SOURCE_DIR/data
44 wget https://www.nominatim.org/data/wikipedia_article.sql.bin
45 wget https://www.nominatim.org/data/wikipedia_redirect.sql.bin
47 Combined the 2 files are around 1.5GB and add around 30GB to the install
48 size of nominatim. They also increase the install time by an hour or so.
50 *NOTE:* you'll need to download the Wikipedia rankings before performing
51 the initial import of the data if you want the rankings applied to the
56 Nominatim can use postcodes from an external source to improve searches that involve a UK postcode. This data can be optionally downloaded:
58 cd $NOMINATIM_SOURCE_DIR/data
59 wget https://www.nominatim.org/data/gb_postcode_data.sql.gz
61 ## Choosing the Data to Import
63 In its default setup Nominatim is configured to import the full OSM data
64 set for the entire planet. Such a setup requires a powerful machine with
65 at least 32GB of RAM and around 800GB of SSD hard disks. Depending on your
66 use case there are various ways to reduce the amount of data imported. This
67 section discusses these methods. They can also be combined.
71 If you only need geocoding for a smaller region, then precomputed extracts
72 are a good way to reduce the database size and import time.
73 [Geofabrik](https://download.geofabrik.de) offers extracts for most countries.
74 They even have daily updates which can be used with the update process described
76 [other providers for extracts](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm#Downloading).
78 Please be aware that some extracts are not cut exactly along the country
79 boundaries. As a result some parts of the boundary may be missing which means
80 that cannot compute the areas for some administrative areas.
82 ### Dropping Data Required for Dynamic Updates
84 About half of the data in Nominatim's database is not really used for serving
85 the API. It is only there to allow the data to be updated from the latest
86 changes from OSM. For many uses these dynamic updates are not really required.
87 If you don't plan to apply updates, the dynamic part of the database can be
88 safely dropped using the following command:
91 ./utils/setup.php --drop
94 Note that you still need to provide for sufficient disk space for the initial
95 import. So this option is particularly interesting if you plan to transfer the
96 database or reuse the space later.
98 ### Reverse-only Imports
100 If you only want to use the Nominatim database for reverse lookups or
101 if you plan to use the installation only for exports to a
102 [photon](http://photon.komoot.de/) database, then you can set up a database
103 without search indexes. Add `--reverse-only` to your setup command above.
105 This saves about 5% of disk space.
107 ### Filtering Imported Data
109 Nominatim normally sets up a full search database containing administrative
110 boundaries, places, streets, addresses and POI data. There are also other
111 import styles available which only read selected data:
113 * **settings/import-admin.style**
114 Only import administrative boundaries and places.
115 * **settings/import-street.style**
116 Like the admin style but also adds streets.
117 * **settings/import-address.style**
118 Import all data necessary to compute addresses down to house number level.
119 * **settings/import-full.style**
120 Default style that also includes points of interest.
122 The style can be changed with the configuration `CONST_Import_Style`.
124 To give you an idea of the impact of using the different style, the table
125 below gives rough estimates of the final database size after import of a
126 2018 planet and after using the `--drop` option. It also shows the time
127 needed for the import on a machine with 32GB RAM, 4 CPUS and SSDs. Note that
128 the given sizes are just an estimate meant for comparison of style requirements.
129 Your planet import is likely to be larger as the OSM data grows with time.
131 style | Import time | DB size | after drop
132 ----------|--------------|------------|------------
133 admin | 5h | 190 GB | 20 GB
134 street | 42h | 400 GB | 180 GB
135 address | 59h | 500 GB | 260 GB
136 full | 80h | 575 GB | 300 GB
138 You can also customize the styles further. For an description of the
139 style format see [the developement section](../develop/Import.md).
141 ## Initial import of the data
143 **Important:** first try the import with a small extract, for example from
144 [Geofabrik](https://download.geofabrik.de).
146 Download the data to import and load the data with the following command
147 from the build directory:
150 ./utils/setup.php --osm-file <data file> --all [--osm2pgsql-cache 28000] 2>&1 | tee setup.log
153 The `--osm2pgsql-cache` parameter is optional but strongly recommended for
154 planet imports. It sets the node cache size for the osm2pgsql import part
155 (see `-C` parameter in osm2pgsql help). As a rule of thumb, this should be
156 about the same size as the file you are importing but never more than
157 2/3 of RAM available. If your machine starts swapping reduce the size.
159 Computing word frequency for search terms can improve the performance of
160 forward geocoding in particular under high load as it helps Postgres' query
161 planner to make the right decisions. To recompute word counts run:
164 ./utils/update.php --recompute-word-counts
167 This will take a couple of hours for a full planet installation. You can
168 also defer that step to a later point in time when you realise that
169 performance becomes an issue. Just make sure that updates are stopped before
170 running this function.
172 If you want to be able to search for places by their type through
173 [special key phrases](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim/Special_Phrases)
174 you also need to enable these key phrases like this:
176 ./utils/specialphrases.php --wiki-import > specialphrases.sql
177 psql -d nominatim -f specialphrases.sql
179 Note that this command downloads the phrases from the wiki link above.
182 ## Installing Tiger housenumber data for the US
184 Nominatim is able to use the official [TIGER](https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger.html)
185 address set to complement the OSM house number data in the US. You can add
186 TIGER data to your own Nominatim instance by following these steps. The
187 entire US adds about 10GB to your database.
189 1. Get preprocessed TIGER 2018 data and unpack it into the
190 data directory in your Nominatim sources:
193 wget https://nominatim.org/data/tiger2018-nominatim-preprocessed.tar.gz
194 tar xf tiger2018-nominatim-preprocessed.tar.gz
196 `data-source/us-tiger/README.md` explains how the data got preprocessed.
198 2. Import the data into your Nominatim database:
200 ./utils/setup.php --import-tiger-data
202 3. Enable use of the Tiger data in your `settings/local.php` by adding:
204 @define('CONST_Use_US_Tiger_Data', true);
206 4. Apply the new settings:
209 ./utils/setup.php --create-functions --enable-diff-updates --create-partition-functions
215 There are many different possibilities to update your Nominatim database.
216 The following section describes how to keep it up-to-date with Pyosmium.
217 For a list of other methods see the output of `./utils/update.php --help`.
219 #### Installing the newest version of Pyosmium
221 It is recommended to install Pyosmium via pip. Run (as the same user who
222 will later run the updates):
225 pip install --user osmium
228 Nominatim needs a tool called `pyosmium-get-updates`, which comes with
229 Pyosmium. You need to tell Nominatim where to find it. Add the
230 following line to your `settings/local.php`:
232 @define('CONST_Pyosmium_Binary', '/home/user/.local/bin/pyosmium-get-changes');
234 The path above is fine if you used the `--user` parameter with pip.
235 Replace `user` with your user name.
237 #### Setting up the update process
239 Next the update needs to be initialised. By default Nominatim is configured
240 to update using the global minutely diffs.
242 If you want a different update source you will need to add some settings
243 to `settings/local.php`. For example, to use the daily country extracts
244 diffs for Ireland from geofabrik add the following:
246 // base URL of the replication service
247 @define('CONST_Replication_Url', 'https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/ireland-and-northern-ireland-updates');
248 // How often upstream publishes diffs
249 @define('CONST_Replication_Update_Interval', '86400');
250 // How long to sleep if no update found yet
251 @define('CONST_Replication_Recheck_Interval', '900');
253 To set up the update process now run the following command:
255 ./utils/update.php --init-updates
257 It outputs the date where updates will start. Recheck that this date is
260 The --init-updates command needs to be rerun whenever the replication service
263 #### Updating Nominatim
265 The following command will keep your database constantly up to date:
267 ./utils/update.php --import-osmosis-all
269 (Note that even though the old name "import-osmosis-all" has been kept for compatibility reasons, Osmosis is not required to run this - it uses pyosmium behind the scenes.)
271 If you have imported multiple country extracts and want to keep them
272 up-to-date, have a look at the script in
273 [issue #60](https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim/issues/60).