Geoserver startup is significantly slower due to chown of GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR and GEOWEBCACHE_CACHE_DIR

[tlvu]

What is the bug or the crash?

This line

docker-geoserver/scripts/entrypoint.sh

Lines 84 to 88 in b8d4388

	# Chown again - seems to fix issue with resolving all created directories
	chown -R "${USER_NAME}":"${GEO_GROUP_NAME}" "${CATALINA_HOME}" "${FOOTPRINTS_DATA_DIR}" "${GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR}" \
	"${CERT_DIR}" "${FONTS_DIR}" /home/"${USER_NAME}"/ "${COMMUNITY_PLUGINS_DIR}" "${STABLE_PLUGINS_DIR}" \
	"${GEOSERVER_HOME}" "${EXTRA_CONFIG_DIR}" /usr/share/fonts/ /scripts /tomcat_apps.zip \
	/tmp/ "${GEOWEBCACHE_CACHE_DIR}";chmod o+rw "${CERT_DIR}";chmod 400 ${CATALINA_HOME}/conf/*

makes Geoserver startup significantly slower for us because our GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR is 229 GB and GEOWEBCACHE_CACHE_DIR is under GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR which basically make it chown twice !

Found when upgrading from 2.19.0 to 2.22.2. That new chown was introduced somewhere in 2.21.x I believe.

Please make it optional to chown GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR and GEOWEBCACHE_CACHE_DIR.

Allow toggle env var like CHOWN_DATA_DIR=false and CHOWN_CACHE_DIR=false, like EXISTING_DATA_DIR=false would be great.

Steps to reproduce the issue

Have a gigantic GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR, see all Geoserver configs in our PR bird-house/birdhouse-deploy#307.

Versions

2.22.2

Additional context

No response

[NyakudyaA]

I think we need a way to test if GWC is inside the data directory like

case "${GEOWEBCACHE_CACHE_DIR}" in
        ${GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR}/*)

then chown once.

As for the flag, how would it still ensure that the correct folder permissions are preserved ?. Remember you are now able to pass your uid to preserve local folder permissions inside the data directory

[tlvu]

Remember you are now able to pass your uid to preserve local folder permissions inside the data directory

I would assume this would cause problem on the first run only. As long as the uid do not change after the first run, we do not need to always chown every time we start Geoserver.

We have been using your Geoserver image since 2.9.3, thanks for the great image by the way. We have never encounter ownership issues, except at the big upgrade from 2.9.3 to 2.19.0. We had to do this chown once and then that's it. New files created by Geoserser should already have the proper ownership so no need to chown again.

So it's not about chown twice or once, it's about not chown at all. So by default, we can continue to chown at each startup but please allow a toogle to opt-out. Of course users who opt-out is responsible to deal with ownership permissions themselves.

[NyakudyaA]

I have got a much more elegant solution that I am going to implement

1. There will be folders that are shown once i.e CATALINA_HOME
2. Chown will still happen for the GeoServer data dir and GWC but as a once-off and on a successive restart this will check if chown has already run and skip the chown unless the ownership of the fils has changed

I will investigate this togle behaviour

[NyakudyaA]

@tlvu Can you test the PR and see if it resolves the issue for you