AZGS custom clustered Geoserver deployment scheme and automation tool

Documentation on how our Geoserver cluster works and a BASH tool for automated deployment of new Geoservers.

The Geoserver cluster lives on Harzburgite at /home/geoserver/tomcat-cluster.

Tomcat binaries live in ~/tomcat-cluster/apache-tomcat-7.0.42 and we're currently running Apache-Tomcat v7.0.42 (http://archive.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-7/v7.0.42/bin/apache-tomcat-7.0.42.tar.gz)

We run each instance of Geoserver in it's own thread of the Tomcat binaries just described. The threads all live in ~/tomcat-cluster/cluster and follow the naming convention: tomcat-XXXX where XXXX is the connector port respective of the thread. So ~/tomcat-cluster/cluster/tomcat-8081 is a Tomcat thread being served out of port 8081.

Build a new thread

First change the following variables in install.sh:

# The port that this Tomcat thread will run on
CONNECTOR_PORT
# The port that this Tomcat thread will shutdown on.  Must be an open port.
SHUTDOWN_PORT
# An alpha-numeric name for the Geoserver instance.  Must start with a letter.
GEOSERVER_NAME

Run install.sh:

$ sudo bash install.sh

If the installation script is not recognized as an executable file, make it one:

$ sudo chmod u+x install.sh

An Upstart process is created in /etc/init/tomcat-[CONNECTOR_PORT].conf and started (service tomcat-[CONNECTOR_PORT] start) as part of the install. This Upstart process starts the Tomcat thread.

After running the installation script, the new Geoserver should be running on:

http://localhost:{CONNECTOR_PORT}/{GEOSERVER_NAME}

To run it under a reverse proxy with Nginx, a new location directive needs to be added into /home/geoserver/config/nginx.config:

location /my_location_directive/ {
	proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:{CONNECTOR_PORT}/{GEOSERVER_NAME};
}

And then reload Nginx:

$ sudo service nginx reload

JSONP

We're deploying custom Tomcat/Geoserver threads with JSONP enabled. Some of our applications (like the AZ Hazard Viewer) have a JSONP dependency. The configuration has already been made, so this isn't something to worry about when deploying fresh instances. But just important to keep in mind for the next time we migrate our data.

When deploying Geoserver with Tomcat, we enable JSONP like this:

# Edit tomcat/bin/setenv.sh, create if it doesn't exist
$ sudo nano ~/tomcat-cluster/apache-tomcat-7.0.42/bin/setenv.sh

# Add the following text and save
$ export ENABLE_JSONP=true and outFormat=text/javascript

And then restart the Tomcat server/thread(s)