I'm just looking into the "GEOSERVER_HOME" issue.
Currently, all the geoserver configuration is read from a set of
directories inside your .WAR file. (the entire data/ directory and the
WEB-INF/catalog.xml file)
This has two main issues:
1. Some servlet contains do not allow you to modify the contents of the
.WAR. This means you can never save your configuration.
2. If you have multiple configuration, its difficult to choose which one
you want to deploy, and difficult to "backup" any configuration.
I'm proposing a simple way of dealing with this - allow setting a
"GEOSERVER_HOME" that would allow reading & writing to a directory that
is NOT in the WAR.
Basically, the directory would look like this:
my_geoserver_config/catalog.xml -- datastore definitions
my_geoserver_config/data/ -- directory of featuretypes, styles,
etc... (same as the current server/geoserver/data directory).
Once the GEOSERVER_HOME directory is known, geoserver can just read &
persist its configuration into that directory.
Unfortunately, its difficult to specify the GEOSERVER_HOME directory!
I'm, therefore, suggesting two ways to specify it:
1. setup a .properties file in the geoserver.jar file. This would
contain the location of the GEOSERVER_HOME directory. If you want to
use another directory, just modify the the .properties and rebuild the
WAR. This is a bit of a pain since you have to re-build the WAR if you
want to change your geoserver_home directory, but it is better than
whats currently there.
2. update the web gui so that it allows someone to "type in" a new
GEOSERVER_HOME. This is nice, but it means you'll have to do this
*every* time you restart geoserver!
It would be nice if these two methods would just allow you to update the
GEOSERVER_HOME in the .properties file, but (as already mentioned) some
servlet containers will not allow you modify any of the files in the
WAR!!
The default should be the same as whats currently happening - it should
use the data directory inside the WAR. If the user wants to update it,
then they'll have to either update the .properties file or type in a
new directory.
What do you think?
dave
ps. this will be done in the 1.3.0RC1 - there isnt enough time for the
1.3.0-beta2
dave
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