Photon fails to start with downloaded France dataset — “Cannot access property meta data. Database too old?”

[navjot101]

I set up the project locally and downloaded the France dataset (around 8 GB) from:

• https://download1.graphhopper.com/public/experimental/extracts/by-country-code/fr/

Then I ran the command:

java -jar .\target\photon-0.7.0.jar -data-dir F:\opensource

However, I encountered the following errors (the same happened with the Luxembourg dataset as well):

2025-10-07 20:03:34,502 [main] INFO de.komoot.photon.App - Start up database cluster, this might take some time.
Cluster Name: photon
Base Path: F:\opensource\photon_data
Num Of Node: 1
Node Name: Node 1
HTTP Port: 9201
Data Directory: F:\opensource\photon_data\node_1\data
Log Directory: F:\opensource\photon_data\node_1\logs
[2025-10-07T20:03:35,099][INFO ][o.o.n.Node] version[2.19.1], pid[2376], build[unknown/unknown/unknown], ...
...
[2025-10-07T19:36:26,510][INFO ][d.k.p.App] Database cluster is now ready.
[2025-10-07T19:36:26,661][ERROR][d.k.p.App] Cannot access property meta data. Database too old?
[2025-10-07T19:36:26,662][INFO ][d.k.p.App] Shutting down the service.
[2025-10-07T19:36:26,662][INFO ][d.k.p.Server] Shutting down OpenSearch runner
[2025-10-07T19:36:26,662][INFO ][o.o.n.Node] stopping ...
[2025-10-07T19:36:26,746][INFO ][o.o.n.Node] stopped
[2025-10-07T19:36:26,746][INFO ][o.o.n.Node] closing ...
[2025-10-07T19:36:26,752][INFO ][o.o.n.Node] closed
[2025-10-07T19:36:26,764][INFO ][stdout] Closed all nodes.

It seems the local Photon instance starts successfully but then fails to read the metadata of the downloaded dataset, showing the message “Database too old?”

Am I missing a step here?

[lonvia]

The database schema for version 0.7.0 (used in the extracts) is no longer compatible with the master version. You need to download the json dump and create a database yourself as described on the extract page.