GeoServer Cloud deployment with docker compose

GeoServer Cloud can be run in a docker composition.

These instructions assume you have Docker Engine, Docker CLI, and the Compose Plugin installed.

GeoServer Cloud can run with various GeoServer catalog and configuration storage backends. For scalability, we recommend using our PostgreSQL backend, pgconfig.

Here are three docker compose based deployment examples to try out:

• Our preferred option, the pgconfig Catalog back-end, specifically developed for GeoServer Cloud with scalability in mind, storing all Catalog and GeoServer configuration in a PostgreSQL database.
• A shared data-directory option, using a mounted volume to share a traditional GeoServer data directory across all services.
• And a deprecated jdbcconfig option, using the GeoServer jdbcconfig and jdbcstore community modules.

Open a terminal and enter the directory where you just downloaded that file, and run docker compose pull to fetch the docker images from Dockerhub:

Note in order to run the containers as a non root user, all service definitions specify a user: 1000:1000, which you should change to the appropriate user id and group id especially if using bind volumes.

$ docker compose pull
Pulling rabbitmq  ... done
Pulling database  ... done
Pulling discovery ... done
Pulling config    ... done
Pulling gateway   ... done
Pulling wfs       ... done
Pulling wms       ... done
Pulling wcs       ... done
Pulling rest      ... done
Pulling gwc       ... done
Pulling webui     ... done

Then start the services with this command:

$ docker compose up -d

Wait for the services to start up, check with docker compose ps until they’re healthy.

Then browse to:

• http://localhost:8761 to access the Discovery service registry page.
• http://localhost:9090 for the GeoServer UI. The GateWay service will take care of proxying requests to the appropriate microservice.

From a usability point of view, there should be no appreciable differences with a traditional GeoServer deployment.

What’s going on inside the local-machine cluster you’ve just run, is that each GeoServer business capability is running as a separate process in a separate docker container, and they’re all in synch in a loosely coupled way using a message driven event-bus.

Experiment dynamic service scaling and registration with docker compose scale <service>=<instances>, for example:

docker compose scale wfs=3 wcs=0
Starting gscloud_wfs_1 ... done
Creating gscloud_wfs_2 ... done
Creating gscloud_wfs_3 ... done
Stopping and removing gscloud_wcs_1 ... done