The search bar in the app is driven by our own photon server. We run it on EC2, and here are some notes on how it is configured to run.

Photon Docker Setup Guide

Start the EC2 Instance

We run an EC2 r6g.large instance running ubuntu. It needs at least 200GB of storage to run with a single copy of the planet wide index.

Install Docker & Tools

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y docker.io docker-compose pbzip2
sudo systemctl enable docker
sudo systemctl start docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

Clone the photon-docker repo and built it

git clone https://github.com/rtuszik/photon-docker.git
cd photon-docker

Then build the image:

docker build -t photon-docker .

Download + Extract the Photon Data

To minimize the storage cost, we can only have a single copy of the data. This means that we want to extract it as it downloads and we disable automatically updating the index. Without this, we have to pay for double the storage on the server 24/7 even though half of it would only be required once a week at most.

I’m going to file a PR against photon-docker but for now we have to extract the data prior to running the docker.

wget -O - https://r2.koalasec.org/public/experimental/photon-db-latest.tar.bz2 | pbzip2 -cd | tar x

Configure docker-compose.yml

Update the volume path:

volumes:
  - /home/ubuntu/photon-docker/photon_data:/photon/photon_data

You may also want to disable automatic updates by adding:

environment:
  - UPDATE_STRATEGY=DISABLED

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Run Photon

docker-compose up -d

Photon will now be running on port 2322.

Confirm It’s Running

Check logs:

docker logs photon-docker

Test the endpoint (replace IP):

curl http://<YOUR_PUBLIC_IP>:2322/api?q=edinburgh

You should see a JSON response with geocoded results.

Check live logs:

docker-compose logs -f

Restart container with config changes:

docker-compose down && docker-compose up -d