The openrouteservice API provides global spatial services by consuming user-generated and collaboratively collected free geographic data directly from OpenStreetMap. It is highly customizable, performant and written in Java.
The following services are available via a HTTP interface served by Tomcat.
- Directions - Returns a route between two or more locations for a selected profile with customizable additional settings and instructions.
- Isochrones - Obtains areas of reachability from given locations.
- Matrix - Computes one-to-many, many-to-one or many-to-many routes for any mode of transport provided by openrouteservice.
To play around with openrouteservice you may use our demonstration server which comes with both the backend and a frontend. Or simply sign up for an API key and fire your requests against the API directly.
Please note that openrouteservice uses a forked and edited version of graphhopper 0.10 which can be found here.
Note
- Our geocoding API is a separate service running the stack built around Pelias.
- Our locations/API is another service which we have coined openpoiservice which can be found here.
We appreciate any kind of contribution - bug reports, new feature suggestion or improving our translations are greatly appreciated. Feel free to create an issue and label it accordingly. If your issue regards the openrouteservice web-app please use the corresponding repository.
If you want to contribute your improvements, please follow the steps outlined in our CONTRIBUTION guidelines
We suggest using docker to install and launch openrouteservice backend. In short, run the following command under the source code tree will get everything done (for this please clone the repository, running docker via the archive is currently not supported).
cd docker && docker-compose upFor more details, check the docker installation guide.
If you need to install without Docker, on an Ubuntu 16.04 system (also generally works with newer Ubuntu versions) you can use the following steps:
- Clone the openrouteservice repository to your machine.
- Make sure that you have java 1.8 set as the default Java environment.
- Make sure that you have Maven installed.
- Download/create an OpenStreetMap pbf file on the machine.
- Copy the
openrouteservice/WebContent/WEB-INF/app.config.samplefile to the same location but renaming it toapp.config. - Update the
app.configfile to reflect the various settings, profiles you want to have running, and the locations of various files, in particular the source location of the OSM file that will be used and additional files required for extended storages. You should make sure that these folders/files are accessible by the service, for example by using thesudo chmod -R 777 [path to folder]command. - From within the
openrouteservicefolder (containing the pom file and the src folder, amongst others) run the commandmvn package. This will build the openrouteservice ready for tomcat deployment.
After you have packaged openrouteservice, there are two options for running it. One is to run the mvn tomcat7:run command which triggers a self contained Tomcat instance, but this is more restrictive in terms of settings for Tomcat. The other is to install and run Tomcat 8 as described next:
- Install Tomcat 8 using
sudo apt-get install tomcat8. - If you want to use system settings (i.e. Java heap size) other than the default, then you need to add these to the
/usr/share/tomcat8/bin/setenv.shfile. If the file is not present, then you can create it. The settings generally used on our servers are similar to:
JAVA_OPTS="-server -XX:TargetSurvivorRatio=75 -XX:SurvivorRatio=64 -XX:MaxTenuringThreshold=3 -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+UseParNewGC -XX:ParallelGCThreads=4 -Xms114g -Xmx114g -XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=50m"
CATALINA_OPTS="(here we set settings for JMX monitoring)"- If you add these new settings to the
setenv.shfile, then you need to restart Tomcat for these to take effect usingsudo systemctl restart tomcat8.service. - To get openrouteservice up and running, copy the
openrouteservice-xxx.warfile found in theopenrouteservice/targetfolder to the Tomcat webapps folder. For example
sudo cp ~/openrouteservice/openroutesrvice/target/openroutservice-4.7.0.war /var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/ors.war- Tomcat should now automatically detect the new WAR file and deploy the service. Depending on profiles and size of the OSM data, this can take some time until openrouteservice has built graphs and is ready for generating routes. You can check if it is ready by accessing
http://localhost:8080/ors/health(the port and URL may be different if you have installed Tomcat differently than above). If you get astatus: readymessage, you are good to go in creating routes.
There are numerous settings within the app.config which are highly dependent on your individual circumstances, but many of these are documented. As a guide however you can look at the app.config.sample file in the docker/conf folder. If you run into issues relating to out of memory or similar, then you will need to adjust java/tomcat settings accordingly.
Openrouteservice offers a set of endpoints for different spatial purposes. They are served with the help of Tomcat in a java servlet container. By default you will be able to query the services with these addresses:
http://localhost:8080/name_of_war_archive/routeshttp://localhost:8080/name_of_war_archive/isochroneshttp://localhost:8080/name_of_war_archive/matrix
For an easy and interactive way to test the api, visit our documentation at openrouteservice.org. After obtaining your key you can try out the different endpoints instantly and start firing requests.
For questions please use our community forum.
If you notice any thing wrong with translations, or you want to add a new language to the ORS instructions, please add/edit files in the src/main/resources/locales folder. You can use the ors_en.resources file as a template as to what information needs to be present. As a guide, for each instruction there are two formats - one where there is a named place (i.e. 47 Berlinerstraße) and one without. It is important to keep the {way_name} tag in the text, but it should be moved to the correct location. To show ORS what language is being used, you should alter the name of the file to include the ISO identifier (i.e. for Austrian German the filename would be ors_de_AT.resources).