Basic knowledge about GeoServer

GeoServer is an open, Java-based server, which allows to display and edit geodata based on the standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) (in particular WMS and WFS). A strength of GeoServer is its flexibility with which it can be extended by additional functionality.

GeoServer is well documented. The documentation is divided into a user-documentation and a developer-documentation:

• User-documentation: https://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/
• Developer-documentation: https://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/developer/

The two links refer to the documentation of the last stable version. The stable in the respective URL can also be replaced by a version number, if you want to access the documentation of a specific GeoServer version. Within this workshop Version 2.18.1 is used, so the resulting URL for the user-documentation is https://docs.geoserver.org/stable/en/user/.

Usually, GeoServer is provided for productive operation as a (Java-)standalone servlet in the form of a .war - file, which can be downloaded from http://geoserver.org/download/. The .war - file must then be published (often called deploy) to a servlet container (for example Tomcat or Jetty) afterwards. The web interface of GeoServer can then be called from the browser.

Further information and details about a classic WAR-installation you can find here.

INFO

GeoServer is already pre-installed on the OSGeoLive system and can be accessed during the workshop at http://localhost:8082/geoserver (see here). This variant differs from the classical deployment as a .war file, since a Java program (start.jar) is executed, which programmatically starts a Jetty-server with Geoserver. This is not important for the contents of the workshop.

In the following section we will first get an overview about GeoServer's administration interface. This includes general information about the server settings, logging files as well as security issues. We will also take a closer look at the menu item data.