osmium-tool

Osmium Command Line Tool

A multipurpose command line tool for working with OpenStreetMap data based on the Osmium library.

Official web site: https://osmcode.org/osmium-tool/

Prerequisites

You need a C++17 compliant compiler.

You also need the following libraries:

Libosmium (>= 2.23.1)
    https://osmcode.org/libosmium
    Debian/Ubuntu: libosmium2-dev
    Fedora/CentOS: libosmium-devel

Protozero (>= 1.6.3)
    https://github.com/mapbox/protozero
    Debian/Ubuntu: libprotozero-dev
    Fedora/CentOS: protozero-devel

NLohmann JSON (>= 3.0)
    https://json.nlohmann.me/
    Debian/Ubuntu: nlohmann-json3-dev

boost-program-options (>= 1.55)
    https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/doc/html/program_options.html
    Debian/Ubuntu: libboost-program-options-dev
    Fedora/CentOS: boost-devel
    openSUSE: boost-devel (use 'libboost_program_options-devel' for modern OS versions)
    vcpkg: boost-program-options

bz2lib
    http://www.bzip.org/
    Debian/Ubuntu: libbz2-dev
    Fedora/CentOS: bzip2-devel
    openSUSE: libbz2-devel
    vcpkg: bzip2

zlib
    https://www.zlib.net/
    Debian/Ubuntu: zlib1g-dev
    Fedora/CentOS: zlib-devel
    openSUSE: zlib-devel
    vcpkg: zlib

LZ4 (optional)
    https://lz4.github.io/lz4/
    Debian/Ubuntu: liblz4-dev
    vcpkg: lz4

    Only needed for LZ4 PBF compression.

Expat
    https://libexpat.github.io/
    Debian/Ubuntu: libexpat1-dev
    Fedora/CentOS: expat-devel
    openSUSE: libexpat-devel
    vcpkg: expat

cmake
    https://cmake.org/
    Debian/Ubuntu: cmake
    Fedora/CentOS: cmake
    openSUSE: cmake

Pandoc
    (Needed to build documentation, optional)
    https://pandoc.org/
    Debian/Ubuntu: pandoc
    Fedora/CentOS: pandoc
    openSUSE: pandoc

On Linux systems most of these libraries are available through your package manager, see the list above for the names of the packages. But make sure to check the versions. If the packaged version available is not new enough, you'll have to install from source. Most likely this is the case for Protozero and Libosmium.

On macOS many of the libraries above will be available through Homebrew. On Windows you can install the libraries with vcpkg.

When building the tool, CMake will automatically look for these libraries in the usual places on your system. In addition it will look for the Libosmium and Protozero libraries in the same directory where this Osmium repository is. So if you are building from the Git repository and want to use the newest Libosmium, Protozero, and Osmium, clone all of them into the same directory:

mkdir work
cd work
git clone https://github.com/mapbox/protozero
git clone https://github.com/osmcode/libosmium
git clone https://github.com/osmcode/osmium-tool

Building

Osmium uses CMake for its builds. On Linux and macOS you can build as follows:

cd osmium-tool
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
ccmake .  ## optional: change CMake settings if needed
make

To set the build type call cmake with -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=type. Possible values are empty, Debug, Release, RelWithDebInfo, MinSizeRel, and Dev. The default is RelWithDebInfo.

Please read the CMake documentation and get familiar with the cmake and ccmake tools which have many more options.

If you have trouble with compiling, look into the files in .github/workflows and .github/actions that run the CI builds to give you some pointers.

Documentation

See the Osmium Tool website and Osmium Tool Manual.

There are man pages in the 'man' directory. To build them you need 'pandoc'. If the pandoc command was found during the CMake config step, the manpages will be built automatically.

Tests

Call ctest in the build directory to run the tests after build.

More extensive tests of the libosmium I/O system can also be run. See test/io/Makefile.in for instructions.

License

Copyright (C) 2013-2026 Jochen Topf ([email protected])

This program is available under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3. See the file LICENSE.txt for the complete text of the license.

Authors

This program was written and is maintained by Jochen Topf ([email protected]).