Nominatim/CONTRIBUTING.md

Nominatim contribution guidelines

Reporting Bugs

Bugs can be reported at https://github.com/openstreetmap/Nominatim/issues. Please always open a separate issue for each problem. In particular, do not add your bugs to closed issues. They may look similar to you but often are completely different from the maintainer's point of view.

If you just have a question or when you are not sure if what you have found is an actual bug, use the Discussion section.

If you have questions about the underlying OpenStreetMap data rather than the geocoding software, then the OpenStreetMap forum is the best place to start.

Workflow for Pull Requests

We love to get pull requests from you. We operate the "Fork & Pull" model explained at

https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests

You should fork the project into your own repo, create a topic branch there and then make a single pull requests back to the main repository. Your pull requests will then be reviewed and discussed.

Please make sure to follow these guidelines:

• Make sure CI passes before opening the pull request. The repo is configured to run the CI on branches. Once you have enabled the CI on your forked repo, Actions will execute every time you push to your branch. Check the Actions tab in your repo to make sure everything works.
• Make sure that you have time to react to these comments and amend the code or engage in a conversation. Do not expect that others will pick up your code, it will almost never happen.
• Open a separate pull request for each issue you want to address. Don't mix multiple changes. In particular, don't mix style cleanups with feature pull requests (exceptions, see 'Style modernisation' below).
• For small fixes and amendments open a PR directly. If you plan to make larger changes, please open an issue first or comment on the appropriate issue to outline your planned implementation.

Using AI-assisted code generators

PRs that include AI-generated content, may that be in code, in the PR description or in documentation need to

1. clearly mark the AI-generated sections as such, for example, by mentioning all use of AI in the PR description, and
2. include proof that you have run the generated code on an actual installation of Nominatim. Adding and executing tests will not be sufficient. You need to show that the code actually solves the problem the PR claims to solve.

Getting Started with Development

Please see the development section of the Nominatim documentation for

• an architecture overview and backgrounds on some of the algorithms
• how to set up a development environment
• and background on how tests are organised

Coding style

The coding style for Python is enforced with flake8. It can be tested with:

make lint

SQL code is currently not linted but should follow the following rules:

• 2 spaces indentation
• UPPER CASE for all SQL keywords

Style modernisation

There are a few places where we modernize code style as we go. The following changes can be made when you touch the code anyway:

• update copyright date in the file header to the current year
• switch Python code to use generics in standard collections

Testing

Before submitting a pull request make sure that the tests pass:

  make tests

Releases

Nominatim follows semantic versioning. Major releases are done for large changes that require (or at least strongly recommend) a reimport of the databases. Minor releases can usually be applied to existing databases. Patch releases contain bug fixes only and are released from a separate branch where the relevant changes are cherry-picked from the master branch.

Checklist for releases:

• increase versions in
  • src/nominatim_api/version.py
  • src/nominatim_db/version.py
• update ChangeLog (copy information from patch releases from release branch)
• complete docs/admin/Migration.md
• update EOL dates in SECURITY.md
• commit and make sure CI tests pass
• update OSMF production repo and release new version -post1 there
• test migration
  • download, build and import previous version
  • migrate using master version
  • run updates using master version
• prepare tarball:
  • git clone https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim (switch to right branch!)
  • rm -r .git*
  • copy country data into data/
  • add version to base directory and package
• upload tarball to https://nominatim.org
• prepare documentation
  • check out new docs branch
  • change git checkout instructions to tarball download instructions or adapt version on existing ones
  • build documentation and copy to https://github.com/osm-search/nominatim-org-site
  • add new version to history
• check release tarball
  • download tarball as per new documentation instructions
  • compile and import Nominatim
  • run nominatim --version to confirm correct version
• tag new release and add a release on github.com
• build pip packages and upload to pypi
  • make build
  • twine upload dist/*