- Automatic import
- Configuration
- Persistent container data
- OpenStreetMap Data Extracts
- Updating the database
- Custom PBF Files
- Importance Dumps, Postcode Data, and Tiger Addresses
- Development
- Docker Compose
- Assorted use cases documented in issues
Download the required data, initialize the database and start nominatim in one go
docker run -it \
-e PBF_URL=https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/monaco-latest.osm.pbf \
-e REPLICATION_URL=https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/monaco-updates/ \
-p 8080:8080 \
--name nominatim \
mediagis/nominatim:4.1
Port 8080 is the nominatim HTTP API port and 5432 is the Postgres port, which you may or may not want to expose.
If you want to check that your data import was successful, you can use the API with the following URL: http://localhost:8080/search.php?q=avenue%20pasteur
The following environment variables are available for configuration:
PBF_URL
: Which OSM extract to download and import. It cannot be used together withPBF_PATH
. Check https://download.geofabrik.dePBF_PATH
: Which OSM extract to import from the .pbf file inside the container. It cannot be used together withPBF_URL
.REPLICATION_URL
: Where to get updates from. Also available from Geofabrik.REPLICATION_UPDATE_INTERVAL
: How often upstream publishes diffs (in seconds, default:86400
). RequiresREPLICATION_URL
to be set.REPLICATION_RECHECK_INTERVAL
: How long to sleep if no update found yet (in seconds, default:900
). RequiresREPLICATION_URL
to be set.UPDATE_MODE
: How to run replication to update nominatim data. Options:continuous
/once
/catch-up
/none
(default:none
)FREEZE
: Freeze database and disable dynamic updates to save space. (default:false
)IMPORT_WIKIPEDIA
: Whether to download and import the Wikipedia importance dumps (true
) or path to importance dump in the container. Importance dumps improve the scoring of results. On a beefy 10 core server, this takes around 5 minutes. (default:false
)IMPORT_US_POSTCODES
: Whether to download and import the US postcode dump (true
) or path to US postcode dump in the container. (default:false
)IMPORT_GB_POSTCODES
: Whether to download and import the GB postcode dump (true
) or path to GB postcode dump in the container. (default:false
)IMPORT_TIGER_ADDRESSES
: Whether to download and import the Tiger address data (true
) or path to a preprocessed Tiger address set in the container. (default:false
)THREADS
: How many threads should be used to import (default:16
)NOMINATIM_PASSWORD
: The password to connect to the database with (default:qaIACxO6wMR3
)
The following run parameters are available for configuration:
shm-size
: Size of the tmpfs in Docker, for bigger imports (e.g. Europe) this needs to be set to at least 1GB or more. Half the size of your available RAM is recommended. (default:64M
)
The following environment variables are available to tune PostgreSQL:
POSTGRES_SHARED_BUFFERS
(default:2GB
)POSTGRES_MAINTENANCE_WORK_MEM
(default:10GB
)POSTGRES_AUTOVACUUM_WORK_MEM
(default:2GB
)POSTGRES_WORK_MEM
(default:50MB
)POSTGRES_EFFECTIVE_CACHE_SIZE
(default:24GB
)POSTGRES_SYNCHRONOUS_COMMIT
(default:off
)POSTGRES_MAX_WAL_SIZE
(default:1GB
)POSTGRES_CHECKPOINT_TIMEOUT
(default:10min
)POSTGRES_CHECKPOINT_COMPLETION_TARGET
(default:0.9
)
See https://nominatim.org/release-docs/4.1.0/admin/Installation/#tuning-the-postgresql-database for more details on those settings.
The import style can be modified through an environment variable :
IMPORT_STYLE
(default:full
)
Available options are :
admin
: Only import administrative boundaries and places.street
: Like the admin style but also adds streets.address
: Import all data necessary to compute addresses down to house number level.full
: Default style that also includes points of interest.extratags
: Like the full style but also adds most of the OSM tags into the extratags column.
See https://nominatim.org/release-docs/4.1.0/admin/Import/#filtering-imported-data for more details on those styles.
In addition you can also mount a volume / bind-mount on /nominatim/flatnode
(see: Persistent container data) to use flatnode storage. This is advised for bigger imports (Europe, North America etc.), see: https://nominatim.org/release-docs/4.1.0/admin/Import/#flatnode-files. If the mount is available for the container, the flatnode configuration is automatically set and used.
If you want to keep your imported data across deletion and recreation of your container, make the following folder a volume:
/var/lib/postgresql/14/main
is the storage location of the Postgres database & holds the state about whether the import was successful/nominatim/flatnode
is the storage location of the flatnode file.
So if you want to be able to kill your container and start it up again with all the data still present use the following command:
docker run -it --shm-size=1g \
-e PBF_URL=https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/monaco-latest.osm.pbf \
-e REPLICATION_URL=https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/monaco-updates/ \
-e IMPORT_WIKIPEDIA=false \
-e NOMINATIM_PASSWORD=very_secure_password \
-v nominatim-data:/var/lib/postgresql/14/main \
-p 8080:8080 \
--name nominatim \
mediagis/nominatim:4.1
Nominatim imports OpenStreetMap (OSM) data extracts. The source of the data can be specified with one of the following environment variables:
PBF_URL
variable specifies the URL. The data is downloaded during initialization, imported and removed from disk afterwards. The data extracts can be freely downloaded, e.g., from Geofabrik's server.PBF_PATH
variable specifies the path to the mounted OSM extracts data inside the container. No .pbf file is removed after initialization.
It is not possible to define both PBF_URL
and PBF_PATH
sources.
The replication update can be performed only via HTTP.
A sample of PBF_PATH
variable usage is:
docker run -it \
-e PBF_PATH=/nominatim/data/monaco-latest.osm.pbf \
-e REPLICATION_URL=https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/monaco-updates/ \
-p 8080:8080 \
-v /osm-maps/data:/nominatim/data \
--name nominatim \
mediagis/nominatim:4.1
where the /osm-maps/data/ directory contains monaco-latest.osm.pbf file that is mounted and available in container: /nominatim/data/monaco-latest.osm.pbf
Full documentation for Nominatim update available here. For a list of other methods see the output of:
docker exec -it nominatim sudo -u nominatim nominatim replication --help
The following command will keep updating the database forever:
docker exec -it nominatim sudo -u nominatim nominatim replication --project-dir /nominatim
If there are no updates available this process will sleep for 15 minutes and try again.
If you want your Nominatim container to host multiple areas from Geofabrik, you can use a tool, such as Osmium, to merge multiple PBF files into one.
docker run -it \
-e PBF_PATH=/nominatim/data/merged.osm.pbf \
-p 8080:8080 \
-v /osm-maps/data:/nominatim/data \
--name nominatim \
mediagis/nominatim:4.1
where the /osm-maps/data/ directory contains merged.osm.pbf file that is mounted and available in container: /nominatim/data/merged.osm.pbf
Including the Wikipedia importance dumps, postcode files, and Tiger address data can improve results. These can be automatically downloaded by setting the appropriate options (see above) to true
. Alternatively, they can be imported from local files by specifying a file path (relative to the container), similar to how PBF_PATH
is used. For example:
docker run -it \
-e PBF_URL=https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/monaco-latest.osm.pbf \
-e IMPORT_WIKIPEDIA=/nominatim/extras/wikimedia-importance.sql.gz \
-p 8080:8080 \
-v /osm-maps/extras:/nominatim/extras \
--name nominatim \
mediagis/nominatim:4.1
Where the path to the importance dump is given relative to the container. (The file does not need to be named wikimedia-importance.sql.gz
.) The same works for IMPORT_US_POSTCODES
and IMPORT_GB_POSTCODES
.
For more information about the Tiger address file, see Installing TIGER housenumber data for the US.
If you want to work on the Docker image you can use the following command to build a local image and run the container with
docker build -t nominatim . && \
docker run -it \
-e PBF_URL=https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/monaco-latest.osm.pbf \
-e REPLICATION_URL=https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/monaco-updates/ \
-p 8080:8080 \
--name nominatim \
nominatim
In addition, we also provide a basic contrib/docker-compose.yml
template which you use as a starting point and adapt to your needs. Use this template to set the environment variables, mounts, etc. as needed.
Besides the basic docker-compose.yml, there are also some advanced YAML configurations available in the contrib
folder.
These files follow the naming convention of docker-compose-*.yml
and contain comments about the specific use case.