nominatim-vagrant

Vagrant boxes running OSM nominatim

via ansible playbooks.

Why?

With the ansible playbooks given here you can do tasks in an idempotent way. I.e.: you can rerun playbooks without the need to rerun every task, if it was already finished.
The ansible playbooks can serve for local vagrants and real remote machines at the same time.

In fact I used the playbooks in here to setup Nominatim on real remote machines (and for local vagrant boxes).

Installing Nominatim (in a vagrant box)

Clone this repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/ulif/nominatim-vagrant

Then change into the created repository:

$ cd nominatim-vagrant/

The local Vagrantfile first configures a vagrant box based on Ubuntu 16.04, installs databases, apache, etc. using provision.yml. You might want to tweak some settings in Vagrantfile and top of provision.yml before creating your vagrant box.

Fire up vagrant:

$ vagrant up ubuntu

This will take a remarkable amount of time, but in the end should give you a running virtualbox ivagrant where you can ssh into:

$ vagrant ssh ubuntu

The database will exist but be empty after this step.

Optional: Installing Nominatim on a Remote Host

You can use the local provision.yml playbook for provisioning remote hosts (not vagrant) as well:

$ ansible-playbook -K -i my.remotehost.org, provision.yml

Please note the colon after the hostname.

This assumes, that you have SSH access (via keyfiles) to the remote host and can sudo entering a password. Ansible will ask you for the sudoer-password.

The remote host should be a Ubuntu 16.04 system.

Installing maps

The desired set of countries, the available memory and other important values can be set at top of installmaps.yml. Edit this file:

$ nano installmaps.yml

Edit the vars section, especially the max_cache_mem value that tells, how much memory there should be available for indexing/importing map data.

Please note, that currently you can set only one map URL for indexing. Map data can normally be retrieved from

http://download.geofabrik.de/

and offer different collections of map data from around the world.

Then, run the playbook. In a vagrant machine this can be done manually like this:

$ ansible-playbook --private-key=.vagrant/machines/ubuntu/virtualbox/private_key -u vagrant -i .vagrant/provisioners/ansible/inventory/vagrant_ansible_inventory installmaps.yml

This step will run for a very, very, very long time, depending on the country you picked above. Larger datasets like europe or the world will take several days even on strong machines with lots of RAM.

The nominatim service will be routed from vagrant port 80 to port 8089 of the host. Edit Vagrantfile if you prefer a different port or similar.

Before proceeding, these steps must have been finished successfully.

Using Nominatim

After vagrant install, the nominatim service is available at port 8089 of your host machine. You can browse to

` http://localhost:8089/nominatim/search.php

to play with your new nominatim server.

Of course you can also talk to your nominatim server via commandline:

$ curl 'http://localhost:8089/nominatim/search.php?format=json&q=17,%20boulevard%20de%20suisse'
[{"place_id":"100822","licence":"Data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0. http:\/\/www.openstreetmap.org\/copyright",
"osm_type":"way","osm_id":"94399519","boundingbox":["43.7379492","43.7383593","7.4217809","7.4224633"],
"lat":"43.7381542","lon":"7.42217981938168","display_name":"Rose de France, 17, Boulevard de Suisse, Monte-Carlo, Monaco, 98000, Monaco",
"class":"building","type":"yes","importance":0.301}]

Oh, and you need the map data of the country you query, of course.

If you installed everything on a remote machine, go to

http://myremote.org/nominatim/

which should show a running nominatim server.