Everything is OSM

Get started with PostGIS + OpenStreetMap data in minutes. Works on Windows, Linux, and Mac. More free time for your OSM community!

This project uses popular development and system configuration tools to build and configure a virtual machine, then download and import OpenStreetMap data extracts from mapzen and geofabrik.

Quickstart

Requirements

First, install recent versions of these:

• Vagrant
• Virtualbox

Choose your extracts

Decide what part of the world you want to import data for. The metro extracts cover major metropolitan areas, and the geofabrik extracts cover countries and international regions.

Note: Larger volumes of data will take more time and might require more virtual machine memory to successfully import; see the section on customizing for instructions on how to increase the amount of RAM if that's happening to you. Also, extremely large amounts of data (larger than a few GB) are not currently supported.

Edit variables.yml so it contains the extracts that you want to include. For example:

metro_extracts:
  - "austin_texas"
  - "barcelona_spain"
  - "portland_oregon"

or:

geofabrik_extracts:
  - "south-america/ecuador"
  - "south-america/peru"

Get the party started

From the command line, just run vagrant up and give it a few minutes to do it does its thing. When it finishes running, a PostGIS database will be ready to go and loaded up with OSM data!

Everything is OSM

The PostGIS database will be available on localhost. For example, to connect to the database from Tilemill:

dbname=osm host=localhost port=5432 user=osm password=osm

Or from QGIS:

Additional Usage

Customizing

The file variables.yml contains the database name, user and password (all default to "osm"), as well as port number (default 5432), and settings for virtual machine memory and number of cpus. Feel free to open up variables.yml and change any of these values. You will need to reload the virtual machine for settings to take effect.

Vagrant Basics

This project uses vagrant to manage the virtual machine. Vagrant provides a pretty simple interface. These are the most relevant commands:

vagrant up starts up the virtual machine and runs through the configuration and import scripts.

vagrant halt stops the virtual machine. This releases any RAM you've dedicated to the virtual machine. After this, the PostGIS database will not be available until vagrant up is run again.

Advanced Vagrant

vagrant reload restarts the virtual machine. It is equivalent to vagrant halt then vagrant up.

vagrant up --no-provision will skip the import phase. This will save time if data extracts have previously been imported and the virtual machine was stopped with vagrant halt.

vagrant destroy will completely wipe out the virtual machine. All the files and data on the virtual machine will be removed, including anything in the database. It is useful if you want to reclaim disk space or just start over from scratch.

vagrant provision will just run through the setup and import phase without stopping the virtual machine. This can be slightly faster than a vagrant reload if new extracts have been added to variables.yml and those need to be imported.

vagrant ssh can be used to login to the virtual machine via secure shell. This can be useful if something went wrong or you just want to poke around.

Super Advanced Additional Usage

The virtual machine underneath all of this is an instance of the Ubuntu 14.04 distribution. The majority of the work is done with Ansible, an open source configuration management system. With only a little bit of fiddling, the scripts can be ported to work with another operating system or run on a remote server. Please feel free to remix, reuse and enjoy!