Run Geoserver on Openshift free cloud hosting

For everyone who was desperate to run a Geoserver instance on a free hosting to try it out or for some other purpose. Openshift is your choice, it offers a free java application hosting with a decent selection of environments and presets. And the most amazing thing is that if get even one High-CPU gear, the performance is really good.

What it does

• Grabs a link to sourcefourge distro from geoserver website (you can choose stable[default] or maintainance release)
• Downloads .war file and unzips it into the webapps/geoserver folder, that's where your geoserver will run
• Grabs the list of available plugins and allows you to select which of them you want to downlad and install
• Optionally turns on the much needed JSONP support [default]
• Optionally removes pom.xml file to disable maven builds on deploy [default]

In short

$ rhc app create myapp jbossews-1.0
$ git clone ssh://<Your Openshift key>@myapp-organisation.rhcloud.com/~/git/myapp.git/ myapp
$ cd myapp
$ bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/w8r/openshift-geoserver/master/install.sh) 2>&1
$ git add --all
$ git commit -m "geoserver"
$ git push origin master
$ open http://myapp-organisation.rhcloud.com/geoserver/

That's it. Deploying will take some time, so I suggest you putting your .shps, .slds or whatever into the webapps/geoserver/data/data folder before the first push.

Step by step

1. Get a free trial account, install their toolkit, everything quite simple, just like heroku
2. I strongly suggest to upgrade to Bronze plan, the use of high-cpu gears really makes difference, but you can omit this step
3. Create a new application, I suggest Tomcat 6(JBoss EWS 1.0), but it works with version 7 as well
4. Follow the instructions, clone out the application repo
5. cd into the repo dir
6. run following command

$ bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/w8r/openshift-geoserver/master/install.sh) 2>&1