tiger-geocoder

Geocoder

US Geocoder module that works on top of free TIGER Line data file from US Census bureau.
Uses PostGIS min 2.x. Do your own geocoding for high volume and avoid paying to 3rd party providers.

Assumes you have a readily available PostGIS 2 + PostgreSQL 9.1+
installed that also has TIGER 2010 database loaded (about 95 GiB). Instructions on
installing Tiger are found here: http://postgis.net for postgis module and
http://postgis.net/docs/manual-2.0/postgis_installation.html#loading_extras_tiger_geocoder

If you need to run a ready installed server see instructions here:
https://github.com/bibanul/tiger-geocoder/wiki/Running-your-own-Geocoder-in-Amazon-EC2

If you need help getting it setup, drop me a mail. Loading the TIGER database in postgres
usually takes 1 week. This can also be hosted on Heroku. I ended up buying an SSD drive
and creating an Ubuntu Xen VM on it that simply runs Postgres 9.1 + PostGis 2.0 + 95GB Tiger DB and Redis store.

Installation:

npm install tiger-geocoder

or to run in Amazon EC2 see here:

https://github.com/bibanul/tiger-geocoder/wiki/Running-your-own-Geocoder-in-Amazon-EC2

Usage

You can pass a string representation of a location and a callback function to geocoder.geocode. It will accept: full street address, street and zip/city+state, zipcode, city + state.

Example:

var geocoder = require('tiger-geocoder');
 
// Geocoding
geocoder.geocode("15337 Cherry ln, Markham, IL", options, function ( err, data ) {
  // do something with data
});
 
geocoder.geocode("Cherry ln, Markham, IL", options, function ( err, data ) {
  // do something with data
});
 
geocoder.geocode("Markham, IL", options, function ( err, data ) {
  // do something with data
});
 
geocoder.geocode("60428", options, function ( err, data ) {
  // do something with data
});
 
 
// Reverse Geocoding
geocoder.reverseGeocode( 33.7489, -84.3789, options, function ( err, data ) {
  // do something with data
});
 
 
 

You have an option to use the native JSON result or request it to be formatted to match a popular provider such as Google, Bing etc. Google response style will look like standard Google JSON Output

You can pass in an optional options hash as a last argument, useful for setting the following:

conString: a connection string to your postgres TIGER database. If not provided it will attempt to read it from heroku HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_BLUE_URL or default to tcp://username:password@localhost/geocoder
redisString: a connection string to an instance of a redis to use. local redis will be used otherwise.
cacheTTL: the Time-To-Live for the redis cache entry, defaults to 1 month
responseFormat: empty string will use internal JSOn format, 'google' will return it in google maps V3 JSON format

Testing:

nodeunit test-tiger-geocoder

Roadmap

• Add support for response mapping for BING, Mapquest, Yahoo etc