population

population is an HTTP service and a CLI utility written in Go, which returns estimates of population sizes within a certain radius of a given place. The URL to query the service is:

/population?place=place_name&radius=radius_in_kms

Installation and running

1. Install Go, gcc and make (macOS users can simply brew install go, make and gcc come pre-installed with the system).
2. Get some population data from geonames and populate the database:

> make release
> ./population load data_file.txt

3. Run make release and then simply ./population. The service runs on port 8080 by default, but you can specify a different port and some other options, see -h.

How to update geographical information

population depends on country files downloaded from geonames. You can download additional files (currently the DB contains 10 of the most populous countries), and then the procedure is as follows:

> ./population dump-db
> ./population load new_data_file.txt
> pkger

Afterwards you can delete the dumped sqlite file.