greenscientist/osrm-backend repository overview

⁠Open Source Routing Machine

High performance routing engine written in C++ designed to run on OpenStreetMap data.

The following services are available via HTTP API, C++ library interface and NodeJs wrapper:

• Nearest - Snaps coordinates to the street network and returns the nearest matches
• Route - Finds the fastest route between coordinates
• Table - Computes the duration or distances of the fastest route between all pairs of supplied coordinates
• Match - Snaps noisy GPS traces to the road network in the most plausible way
• Trip - Solves the Traveling Salesman Problem using a greedy heuristic
• Tile - Generates Mapbox Vector Tiles with internal routing metadata

To quickly try OSRM use our demo server⁠ which comes with both the backend and a frontend on top.

For a quick introduction about how the road network is represented in OpenStreetMap and how to map specific road network features have a look at the OSM wiki on routing⁠ or this guide about mapping for navigation⁠.

Related Project-OSRM⁠ repositories:

• osrm-frontend⁠ - User-facing frontend with map. The demo server runs this on top of the backend
• osrm-text-instructions⁠ - Text instructions from OSRM route response
• osrm-backend-docker⁠ - Ready to use Docker images

⁠Documentation

⁠Full documentation

• Hosted documentation⁠
• osrm-routed HTTP API documentation⁠
• libosrm API documentation⁠

⁠Contact

• Discord: join⁠
• BlueSky: profile⁠

⁠Quick Start

The easiest and quickest way to setup your own routing engine is to use Docker images we provide.

There are two pre-processing pipelines available:

• Contraction Hierarchies (CH)
• Multi-Level Dijkstra (MLD)

We recommend using MLD by default except for special use cases such as very large distance matrices where CH is still a better fit for the time being. In the following we explain the MLD pipeline. If you want to use the CH pipeline instead replace osrm-partition and osrm-customize with a single osrm-contract and change the algorithm option for osrm-routed to --algorithm ch.

⁠Using Docker

We base our Docker images (backend⁠, frontend⁠) on Debian and make sure they are as lightweight as possible. Older backend versions can be found on Docker Hub⁠.

Download OpenStreetMap extracts for example from Geofabrik⁠

wget http://download.geofabrik.de/europe/germany/berlin-latest.osm.pbf

Pre-process the extract with the car profile and start a routing engine HTTP server on port 5000

docker run -t -v "${PWD}:/data" ghcr.io/project-osrm/osrm-backend osrm-extract -p /opt/car.lua /data/berlin-latest.osm.pbf || echo "osrm-extract failed"

The flag -v "${PWD}:/data" creates the directory /data inside the docker container and makes the current working directory "${PWD}" available there. The file /data/berlin-latest.osm.pbf inside the container is referring to "${PWD}/berlin-latest.osm.pbf" on the host. Noting that this process can take a long time to complete with little changes on the terminal output, for example, a Mexico's OSM file of 550.7MB took around 30 minutes to finish extraction and generate edge-expanded graph representation.

docker run -t -v "${PWD}:/data" ghcr.io/project-osrm/osrm-backend osrm-partition /data/berlin-latest.osrm || echo "osrm-partition failed"
docker run -t -v "${PWD}:/data" ghcr.io/project-osrm/osrm-backend osrm-customize /data/berlin-latest.osrm || echo "osrm-customize failed"

Note there is no berlin-latest.osrm file, but multiple berlin-latest.osrm.* files, i.e. berlin-latest.osrm is not a file path, but a "base" path referring to a set of files and there is an option to omit this .osrm suffix completely (e.g. osrm-partition /data/berlin-latest).

docker run -t -i -p 5000:5000 -v "${PWD}:/data" ghcr.io/project-osrm/osrm-backend osrm-routed --algorithm mld /data/berlin-latest.osrm

Make requests against the HTTP server

curl "http://127.0.0.1:5000/route/v1/driving/13.388860,52.517037;13.385983,52.496891?steps=true"

Optionally start a user-friendly frontend on port 9966, and open it up in your browser

docker run -p 9966:9966 osrm/osrm-frontend
xdg-open 'http://127.0.0.1:9966'

In case Docker complains about not being able to connect to the Docker daemon make sure you are in the docker group.

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

After adding yourself to the docker group make sure to log out and back in again with your terminal.

We support the following images in the Container Registry:

⁠Building from Source

The following targets Ubuntu 22.04. For instructions how to build on different distributions, macOS or Windows see our Wiki⁠.

Install dependencies

sudo apt install build-essential git cmake pkg-config \
libbz2-dev libxml2-dev libzip-dev libboost-all-dev \
lua5.2 liblua5.2-dev libtbb-dev

Compile and install OSRM binaries

mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .
sudo cmake --build . --target install

⁠Request Against the Demo Server

Read the API usage policy⁠.

Simple query with instructions and alternatives on Berlin:

curl "https://router.project-osrm.org/route/v1/driving/13.388860,52.517037;13.385983,52.496891?steps=true&alternatives=true"

⁠Using the Node.js Bindings

The Node.js bindings provide read-only access to the routing engine. We provide API documentation and examples here⁠.

You will need a modern libstdc++ toolchain (>= GLIBCXX_3.4.26) for binary compatibility if you want to use the pre-built binaries. For older Ubuntu systems you can upgrade your standard library for example with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y libstdc++-9-dev

You can install the Node.js bindings via npm install @project-osrm/osrm or from this repository either via

npm install

which will check and use pre-built binaries if they're available for this release and your Node version, or via

npm install --build-from-source

to always force building the Node.js bindings from source.

⁠Unscoped packages

Prior to v5.27.0, the osrm Node package was unscoped. If you are upgrading from an old package, you will need to do the following:

npm uninstall osrm --save
npm install @project-osrm/osrm --save

⁠Package docs

For usage details have a look these API docs⁠.

An exemplary implementation by a 3rd party with Docker and Node.js can be found here⁠.

⁠References in publications

When using the code in a (scientific) publication, please cite

@inproceedings{luxen-vetter-2011,
 author = {Luxen, Dennis and Vetter, Christian},
 title = {Real-time routing with OpenStreetMap data},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems},
 series = {GIS '11},
 year = {2011},
 isbn = {978-1-4503-1031-4},
 location = {Chicago, Illinois},
 pages = {513--516},
 numpages = {4},
 url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2093973.2094062},
 doi = {10.1145/2093973.2094062},
 acmid = {2094062},
 publisher = {ACM},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
}