This is a tool for allowing user friendly proximity queries from OpenStreetMap data.

Bellingcat has a hosted version of the tool at https://osm-search.bellingcat.com/. For more information, see the accompanying article.

A Postgres database must be set up with OSM data. This can be done with osm2pgsql.

osm2pgsql -d osm --hstore-all planet-latest.osm.pbf

Next, some additional setup should be done on the database for performance and to create a combined view of all the data:

psql -d osm clean.sql
psql -d osm cluster.sql
psql -d osm index.sql
psql -d osm analyze.sql
psql -d osm views.sql

Note that if you run this using the entire planet OSM file, it will require about 700GB of space.

The API requires environment variables for connection with Postgres.

• PG_DB
• PG_HOST
• PG_PORT
• PG_USER
• PG_PASSWORD

It also requires a Google Firebase service account credentials file, which must be named service_account.json.

The frontend requires environment variables for Mapbox geocoding queries and for Firebase. These variables will be publicly viewable and built into the app.

• VUE_APP_MAPBOX_TOKEN
• VUE_APP_FIREBASE_API_KEY
• VUE_APP_FIREBASE_AUTH_DOMAIN
• VUE_APP_FIREBASE_PROJECT_ID
• VUE_APP_FIREBASE_STORAGE_BUCKET
• VUE_APP_FIREBASE_MESSAGING_SENDER_ID
• VUE_APP_FIREBASE_APP_ID