Meridian works by importing the OpenStreetMap places dataset into MySQL. You can download global or region data from various OpenStreetMap mirrors. If downloading in .pbf format, use the tool osmium to extract data into .xml.
For example, given a file north-america-latest.osm.pbf, to extract roughly the Austin, Texas area to a new file:
$ osmium extract -b -98.0956,30.0489,-97.2963,30.5244 north-america-latest.osm.pbf -o austin.xml
import.rb reads the .xml file and outputs SQL INSERT statements which can be fed into MySQL.
Make sure to install Ruby version 2.7.6 and run bundle install to get things set up.
Example usage:
$ bundle exec ruby import.rb austin.xml > places.sql
$ mysqladmin -u root -p create meridian_dev
$ mysql -u root -p meridian_dev < places.sql
To configure the web app, create a .env file with DATABASE_URL=mysql2://... using your database name and credentials. Run the web app with:
$ bundle exec dotenv ruby app.rb
Place icons use Font Awesome. You can add FONTAWESOME_URL= to your .env file to specify a Kit JS URL.