UK Postcodes Import and Lookup

Laravel 5.5 project that imports UK postcodes and offers an API to search postodes (for example by LAT/LONG).

How it works

Import Postcodes

Before looking for a postcode you will have to import them. To this effect the project provides a command that download and import the UK postcodes info into the database.

The command can be run as follows:

php artisan import:postcodes

This command is a one off unless you want to update the records with new downloaded data. Please take into account that it will be slow to run but it will show the progress information while it is running.

Note: Before running the command please create an empty file in database/sqlite/database.sqlite. This can be done with

touch database/sqlite/database.sqlite

Postcode search

The project offer two endpoints to search postcodes:

Partial Match

The endpoint /api/postcodes/{partialSearch} accepts a string in partialSearch

This endpoint gives a paginated result of postcodes partially matching by postcode (pcd).

Example /api/postcodes/BH11A

Latitude and Longitude

The endpoint /api/postcodes/search accepts the following parameters

• lat - required latitude
• long - required longitude
• dt - optional - distance search

This endpoint gives a paginated result of postcodes found within the distance provided using the latitude and longitude provided.

Example /api/postcodes/search?lat=53.607145&long=-2.309467&dt=2

License

The UK Postcodes Import and Lookup project is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.