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
54 ### Great Britain, USA postcodes
56 Nominatim can use postcodes from an external source to improve searches that
57 involve a GB or US postcode. This data can be optionally downloaded:
59 cd $NOMINATIM_SOURCE_DIR/data
60 wget https://www.nominatim.org/data/gb_postcode_data.sql.gz
61 wget https://www.nominatim.org/data/us_postcode_data.sql.gz
63 ## Choosing the Data to Import
65 In its default setup Nominatim is configured to import the full OSM data
66 set for the entire planet. Such a setup requires a powerful machine with
67 at least 32GB of RAM and around 800GB of SSD hard disks. Depending on your
68 use case there are various ways to reduce the amount of data imported. This
69 section discusses these methods. They can also be combined.
73 If you only need geocoding for a smaller region, then precomputed extracts
74 are a good way to reduce the database size and import time.
75 [Geofabrik](https://download.geofabrik.de) offers extracts for most countries.
76 They even have daily updates which can be used with the update process described
78 [other providers for extracts](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm#Downloading).
80 Please be aware that some extracts are not cut exactly along the country
81 boundaries. As a result some parts of the boundary may be missing which means
82 that Nominatim cannot compute the areas for some administrative areas.
84 ### Dropping Data Required for Dynamic Updates
86 About half of the data in Nominatim's database is not really used for serving
87 the API. It is only there to allow the data to be updated from the latest
88 changes from OSM. For many uses these dynamic updates are not really required.
89 If you don't plan to apply updates, the dynamic part of the database can be
90 safely dropped using the following command:
93 ./utils/setup.php --drop
96 Note that you still need to provide for sufficient disk space for the initial
97 import. So this option is particularly interesting if you plan to transfer the
98 database or reuse the space later.
100 ### Reverse-only Imports
102 If you only want to use the Nominatim database for reverse lookups or
103 if you plan to use the installation only for exports to a
104 [photon](https://photon.komoot.de/) database, then you can set up a database
105 without search indexes. Add `--reverse-only` to your setup command above.
107 This saves about 5% of disk space.
109 ### Filtering Imported Data
111 Nominatim normally sets up a full search database containing administrative
112 boundaries, places, streets, addresses and POI data. There are also other
113 import styles available which only read selected data:
115 * **settings/import-admin.style**
116 Only import administrative boundaries and places.
117 * **settings/import-street.style**
118 Like the admin style but also adds streets.
119 * **settings/import-address.style**
120 Import all data necessary to compute addresses down to house number level.
121 * **settings/import-full.style**
122 Default style that also includes points of interest.
124 The style can be changed with the configuration `CONST_Import_Style`.
126 To give you an idea of the impact of using the different styles, the table
127 below gives rough estimates of the final database size after import of a
128 2018 planet and after using the `--drop` option. It also shows the time
129 needed for the import on a machine with 32GB RAM, 4 CPUS and SSDs. Note that
130 the given sizes are just an estimate meant for comparison of style requirements.
131 Your planet import is likely to be larger as the OSM data grows with time.
133 style | Import time | DB size | after drop
134 ----------|--------------|------------|------------
135 admin | 5h | 190 GB | 20 GB
136 street | 42h | 400 GB | 180 GB
137 address | 59h | 500 GB | 260 GB
138 full | 80h | 575 GB | 300 GB
140 You can also customize the styles further. For an description of the
141 style format see [the development section](../develop/Import.md).
143 ## Initial import of the data
145 **Important:** first try the import with a small extract, for example from
146 [Geofabrik](https://download.geofabrik.de).
148 Download the data to import and load the data with the following command
149 from the build directory:
152 ./utils/setup.php --osm-file <data file> --all [--osm2pgsql-cache 28000] 2>&1 | tee setup.log
155 The `--osm2pgsql-cache` parameter is optional but strongly recommended for
156 planet imports. It sets the node cache size for the osm2pgsql import part
157 (see `-C` parameter in osm2pgsql help). As a rule of thumb, this should be
158 about the same size as the file you are importing but never more than
159 2/3 of RAM available. If your machine starts swapping reduce the size.
161 Computing word frequency for search terms can improve the performance of
162 forward geocoding in particular under high load as it helps PostgreSQL's query
163 planner to make the right decisions. To recompute word counts run:
166 ./utils/update.php --recompute-word-counts
169 This will take a couple of hours for a full planet installation. You can
170 also defer that step to a later point in time when you realise that
171 performance becomes an issue. Just make sure that updates are stopped before
172 running this function.
174 If you want to be able to search for places by their type through
175 [special key phrases](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim/Special_Phrases)
176 you also need to enable these key phrases like this:
178 ./utils/specialphrases.php --wiki-import > specialphrases.sql
179 psql -d nominatim -f specialphrases.sql
181 Note that this command downloads the phrases from the wiki link above.
184 ## Installing Tiger housenumber data for the US
186 Nominatim is able to use the official [TIGER](https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger.html)
187 address set to complement the OSM house number data in the US. You can add
188 TIGER data to your own Nominatim instance by following these steps. The
189 entire US adds about 10GB to your database.
191 1. Get preprocessed TIGER 2018 data and unpack it into the
192 data directory in your Nominatim sources:
195 wget https://nominatim.org/data/tiger2018-nominatim-preprocessed.tar.gz
196 tar xf tiger2018-nominatim-preprocessed.tar.gz
198 `data-source/us-tiger/README.md` explains how the data got preprocessed.
200 2. Import the data into your Nominatim database:
202 ./utils/setup.php --import-tiger-data
204 3. Enable use of the Tiger data in your `settings/local.php` by adding:
206 @define('CONST_Use_US_Tiger_Data', true);
208 4. Apply the new settings:
211 ./utils/setup.php --create-functions --enable-diff-updates --create-partition-functions
217 There are many different ways to update your Nominatim database.
218 The following section describes how to keep it up-to-date with Pyosmium.
219 For a list of other methods see the output of `./utils/update.php --help`.
221 #### Installing the newest version of Pyosmium
223 It is recommended to install Pyosmium via pip. Make sure to use python3.
224 Run (as the same user who will later run the updates):
227 pip3 install --user osmium
230 Nominatim needs a tool called `pyosmium-get-updates` which comes with
231 Pyosmium. You need to tell Nominatim where to find it. Add the
232 following line to your `settings/local.php`:
234 @define('CONST_Pyosmium_Binary', '/home/user/.local/bin/pyosmium-get-changes');
236 The path above is fine if you used the `--user` parameter with pip.
237 Replace `user` with your user name.
239 #### Setting up the update process
241 Next the update needs to be initialised. By default Nominatim is configured
242 to update using the global minutely diffs.
244 If you want a different update source you will need to add some settings
245 to `settings/local.php`. For example, to use the daily country extracts
246 diffs for Ireland from Geofabrik add the following:
248 // base URL of the replication service
249 @define('CONST_Replication_Url', 'https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/ireland-and-northern-ireland-updates');
250 // How often upstream publishes diffs
251 @define('CONST_Replication_Update_Interval', '86400');
252 // How long to sleep if no update found yet
253 @define('CONST_Replication_Recheck_Interval', '900');
255 To set up the update process now run the following command:
257 ./utils/update.php --init-updates
259 It outputs the date where updates will start. Recheck that this date is
262 The `--init-updates` command needs to be rerun whenever the replication service
265 #### Updating Nominatim
267 The following command will keep your database constantly up to date:
269 ./utils/update.php --import-osmosis-all
271 (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.)
273 If you have imported multiple country extracts and want to keep them
274 up-to-date, have a look at the script in
275 [issue #60](https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim/issues/60).