Install osmosis with Homebrew, apt, MacPorts

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• osmosis

Project history

Osmosis was built around a component pipeline model: tasks for reading, writing, filtering, sorting, database access, replication, and change handling can be chained to form larger data flows. The repository and wiki both describe this as the core design choice, allowing new tasks to be added without rewriting common file and database handling.

The project is closely associated with Brett Henderson in the OSM community. The build metadata lists Brett Henderson as a developer, and a 2020 osmosis-dev message from Michal Migurski describes picking up light Osmosis maintenance from Brett Henderson.

Adoption history

Osmosis was a central OSM data plumbing tool during the period when planet dumps, database snapshots, replication streams, and regional extracts needed a common Java-based processor. The OpenStreetMap wiki lists workflows such as generating planet dumps from a database, loading dumps into a database, producing changesets from history tables, applying changesets, comparing planet files, sorting dumps, and extracting data by bounding box or polygon.

Development later shifted into light maintenance. The GitHub README says active development stopped in 2018 and describes periodic pull-request acceptance and minor releases; the OpenStreetMap wiki likewise points users toward Osmium as a recommended alternative while preserving Osmosis documentation for workflows that still depend on it.

How it is used

Developers use Osmosis by composing ordered command-line tasks, such as reading a PBF or XML file, applying a tag filter, adding referenced nodes, and writing the result. Its detailed usage documentation is large because each task exposes its own options, and argument order is part of the pipeline semantics.

Osmosis is also used in replication and database workflows where OSM change files and API database schemas matter. The 2020 maintenance note specifically mentions a release motivated by an API database schema change, which illustrates its role at the boundary between OSM files and OSM infrastructure.

Why package nerds care

Osmosis matters as a long-lived Java package in a tooling ecosystem that also contains small C utilities and modern C++ libraries. It shows how early OSM infrastructure favored chainable, extensible data processors before lighter compiled tools absorbed many routine file-processing jobs.

Timeline

• The 0.35 release was the last release to support OSM API 0.5 data. The project README records the 2018 move away from active development. In March 2020, Michal Migurski announced light maintenance work beginning with a 0.47.1 release. GitHub lists 0.49.2 as a December 3, 2023 release.

Related projects

• Osmium is the recommended alternative named by the OSM wiki for many workflows. osmfilter and osmconvert provide smaller compiled alternatives for filtering and conversion. OSMembrane is documented as a frontend for Osmosis usage.

Sources

• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/osmosis
• https://github.com/openstreetmap/osmosis
• https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmosis-dev/2020-March/001861.html
• https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmosis
• https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmosis/Detailed_Usage