More explicit installation instructions

[openvenues]

More explicit installation instructions

[albarrentine]

node-postal is a thin wrapper around libpostal, which is written in C and does all the heavy lifting. The C library can be found here: https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal and is also written/maintained by me. Cloning that repo is the first step under "Installing libpostal" in the instructions, and seeing the output above means you've already run the install for it.

It looks like there was an error while running make for the C library, probably related to disk space. Make sure there's at least 2.2G of disk space available in whichever directory you specified during ./configure --datadir=[some dir] and that the make and sudo make install commands succeed before moving on to installing the bindings. If downloading the data files fails, subsequent steps like installing libpostal.h in /usr/local/include and libpostal.so in /usr/local/lib fail as well, hence why Node can't find them at compile-time. There shouldn't be any path manipulation needed to help the Node bindings find libpostal. /usr/local/{include,lib} should be on the default paths.

"Installing node-gyp on Linux" is just about prerequisites for Linux specifically. On Mac all the prereqs come with Xcode, so that section doesn't apply and sudo npm install -g node-gyp should be all that's needed.

The Node bindings are tested on most major versions of Node going back to 0.10 and we use a library called Nan, which abstracts changes in the V8/Native C++ APIs across versions of Node. Using Nan's macros allows node-postal to stay backward-compatible and relatively future-proof since Nan is maintained by the NodeJS team.

[jefffriesen]

@thatdatabaseguy I got it running. Thank you.

It's weird - I ran the make script and it just gave up downloading. I was on reasonably fast, stable connections both times.

Here is where it stopped the second time:

The first time it stopped it got through language_classifier.tar.gz.7. And then you were right, everything failed after that.

Thanks again.

[albarrentine]

Hmm, connections to S3 can sometimes bork at random, which may be the cause. With 10 concurrents it's certainly possible. Just added retries to the underlying curl commands with openvenues/libpostal@01afbf8, which should hopefully help in future cases.

[jefffriesen]

Nice, thanks.

Btw, I love the long, super-detailed writeup on how you implemented libpostal (https://mapzen.com/blog/inside-libpostal/). Looking forward to geocoding solutions built on top of it too!

Thanks again