Hi all, This is something that has been floating around in my head for quite some time and I wanted to throw some ideas out and see what people think of them.
So the use case here is be able to run GeoServer "live", that is straight off a CD or a USB stick. The problem is however that, as many know, GeoServer needs write access to be able to run. Now with a USB stick with enough space on it this is not an issue, but after a recent bad experience with USB sticks in labs, not having a CD to fall back on is suicide in my opinion :). To find the instances I started GeoServer with an unwritable data directory and it blew up with issues related to logging, writable file checks, data like shapefiles locking and writing out index files, and more. Past startup there is also the obvious fact that without a writable data directory there would be no ability to save any changes made via the web ui. Not ideal in a workshop situation. So... my thought about the easiest way to get around this situation would be to somehow tell GeoServer to use the temporary O/S space, or use the users home directory for the data dir. My first thought on how to do this is to use "special" values for the GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR parameter. Something like: -DGEOSERVER_DATA_DIR=[TMP] or -DGEOSERVER_DATA_DIR=[HOME] Then the GeoServerDataDirectory.init() method would recognize these values and set the data directory path accordingly. So continuing on with this, what about content inside the data directory? If you start geoserver with an "empty" data directory it still chokes. So my thought was to have GeoServerDataDirectory.init() not only set the path based on the special values, but also initialize the directory structure (only on the first run of course). It seems logical to me to just use the minimal data directory in this case, which is just a skeleton catalog.xml and services.xml, and 4 sld files. However... in a workshop situation this is also not ideal, since we are going to want people to have a data directory which has been pre-configured. So my thought to get around this would be to support an additional startup parameter, called something like "GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR_TEMPLATE". The value of the parameter is a path to a data directory... however instead of using that path directly, the behavior is instead to copy the contents of it to temporary O/S space / home directory. So startup would look something like: -DGEOSERVER_DATA_DIR=[TMP] -DGEOSERVER_DATA_DIR_TEMPLATE=E:\GeoServer\data_dir End of rant. Feedback welcome :). -JD -- Justin Deoliveira Software Engineer, OpenGeo http://opengeo.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Geoserver-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geoserver-devel
