QGIS Server Landing Page Plugin

A proof of concept plugin for the QGIS server landing page.

Motivation

The current "out of the box" user experience for a QGIS Server when you point your browser to the root address https://www.your-qgis-server.com/ is to show an ugly and uninformative XML error. This is of course the standard XML response for a WMS server designed fo machine-2-machine communication.

Recently I implemented OAPIF/WFS3 for QGIS server, it provides a landing page in HTML and a user-friendly fully browsable website with basic mapping capabilities to quickly browse your datasets.

Inspired by this development and thanks to the new APIs that it provides I thought that the same concept should have been extended to the whole QGIS Server.

Goals

The goal of this plugin is to provide a fully functional, (almost) zero configuration, simple catalog that shows the list of QGIS projects served by the QGIS Server installation.

The landing page shows the catalog entries with their metadata and links to the various services (WMS, WFS etc.) and a simple WebGIS map that allows for immediate browsing of the project data.

Limitations

This is currently a proof-of-concept that does not take into account caching or performances in case of heavy load websites.

It is probably fine for a limited (<20) set of projects and where each projects has a limited set of layers (<20) but there is certainly room for improvements in case we decide to adopt this strategy for QGIS Server globally.

Technology

The server plugin part is implemented in Python and it uses the newest QGIS Server library classes.

The client is implemented in Vue JS.

Configuration

The projects that are seen by the catalog are searched in one or more directories that can be specified by the following configuration option passed as environment variables.

QGIS_SERVER_LANDING_PAGE_PROJECTS_DIRECTORIES=/plugins/landingpage/tests/projects||/plugins/landingpage/tests/projects2

Note: the || allows to specify multiple search paths.

Additionally, tf you decide to store your project into a PostGIS DB, you can also specify the connection(s) using the conventional notation used internally by QGIS:

QGIS_SERVER_LANDING_PAGE_PROJECTS_PG_CONNECTIONS=postgresql://myhost:myport?sslmode=disable&dbname=landing_page_test&schema=public&username=elpaso&password=mypassword

Building

The source tree does not contain a built client javascript application.

A Vue Docker image is necessary. You can build it thanks to the Dockerfile.vue.dockerfile file or just pull the image:

docker pull elpaso/vue-builder

Then, to build the application you need to:

cd plugins/landingpage/app
../../../vue yarn install
../../../vue yarn build

Testing docker

The provided Docker compose can be used to test this plugin.

Sample .env file

The configuration for the Docker compose:

DOCKER_SHARED_VOLUME=/home/dev/Dockers/qgis-server-standalone-docker/shared-volume
POSTGRES_DBNAME=geo
POSTGRES_USER=geo
POSTGRES_PASS=geo
# 2 is critical 3 is no logs
QGIS_SERVER_LOG_LEVEL=0
PUBLIC_HOSTNAME=test_qgis_server
PLUGINS_VOLUME=/home/dev/Dockers/qgis-server-standalone-docker/plugins
PUBLIC_PORT=8002
# Can be overridden, default to /usr/share/qgis/resources/server/api/
QGIS_SERVER_API_RESOURCES_DIRECTORY=/usr/share/qgis/resources/server/api/
# Landing page plugin (container paths, separated by || if more than one)
QGIS_SERVER_LANDING_PAGE_PROJECTS_DIRECTORIES=/plugins/landingpage/tests/projects||/plugins/landingpage/tests/projects2

QGIS_SERVER_LANDINGPAGE_DEBUG when activated will print all json information inside the templates.

TODO

Plugin

• Map footer with CRS, scale etc. (zoom to predefined scale?)
• Relations and joins? (dependent on WFW3 active)
• BBOX selection
• map themese
• base maps switcher
• open QgsProject without loading layers

Docker

• PG PKI certs?

Development

From base directory:

1. launch ./run_local.sh
2. open another terminal and: cd plugins/landingpage/app && ../../../vue yarn serve