Postpass Operations

August 12, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

I am currently running an instance of the Postpass service on Geofabrik servers at https://postpass.geofabrik.de/.

Try it out:

curl -G https://postpass.geofabrik.de/api/interpreter --data-urlencode "data=
    SELECT tags, geom 
    FROM postpass_point
    WHERE tags->>'amenity'='fast_food' 
    AND geom && st_makeenvelope(8.34,48.97,8.46,49.03,4326)"

Or: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/21wP

{{data:sql,server=https://postpass.geofabrik.de/api/}}

SELECT tags, geom
FROM postpass_point
WHERE tags->>'amenity'='fast_food'
AND geom && {{bbox}}

Or: on Overpass Ultra

---
type: postpass
---
SELECT tags, geom
FROM postpass_point
WHERE tags->>'amenity'='fast_food'
AND geom && ST_MakeEnvelope({{wsen}},4326)

This repository does not contain any software. It is intended to document details about this particular instance (such as which database schema is currently available, which software version is running and so on).

Please use the "issues" feature of this repository if you want to discuss operational issues.

Formatter

In addition to the plain Postpass service, this particular instance also runs the Postpass formatter which allows you to request results in different output formats. Instead of the path component interpreter use the path component formatter, and supply an additional parameter format saying which format you want. For example, to get the top 10 amenity values in a bbox as a markdown table:

curl -G https://postpass.geofabrik.de/api/formatter \
    --data-urlencode "format=md_table" \
    --data-urlencode "data=
    SELECT tags->>'amenity' AS amenity, count(*) AS count 
    FROM postpass_point 
    WHERE tags?'amenity' 
    AND geom && st_makeenvelope(8.34,48.97,8.46,49.03,4326) 
    GROUP BY amenity 
    ORDER BY count DESC 
    LIMIT 10"

Database schema

See SCHEMA.md for a description of the database schema.

The data can be imported with:

osm2pgsql -O flex -S ./postpass.lua INPUT_FILENAME.osm.pbf
psql -f views.sql
psql -f grant-readonly.sql
./land-polygons/land-polygons-reimport.sh

This need a version of osm2pgsql with at least commit 61ac7152. v2.2.0 does not have this commit.

Talk slides

I presented the software with many examples at the State of the Map and State of the Map EU conferences in 2025, and here are the talk slides. A German-language presentation was also held at FOSSGIS 2025 (slides) but caution, this was an earlier version and many things in that talk are not accurate for the currently running version.

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