Getting Neatline Up and Running: Geoserver? « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

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Getting Neatline Up and Running: Geoserver?

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Asked 3 years ago by Shawn
Latest answer from Shawn
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Shawn
Member
Hi Folks,

I want to have neatline (neatline.org) up and running, using a variety of historical maps. Y'know, for kids.

So omeka is installed, check.
Neatline is installed, check.
Neatline maps is installed, check.
Per this page: http://neatline.org/plugins/neatline-maps/ I need to have an instance of Geoserver running. I download it, and successfully get it running on my machine.

But surely that's a problem, right? Because when I add my server on localhost to the neatline maps server page, my server is always offline. So:

Do I need to have Geoserver on the same server as my omeka/neatline?

And if so, could somebody direct me to a for-idiots guide? My space is with Dreamhost (if that matters).

Thanks!
Shawn
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Posted 3 years ago Permalink
Wayne Graham
Member

Hi Shawn,

Are you trying to you computer using localhost from Dreamhost, or is everything on Dreamhost? If you're trying to point Dreamhost to localhost, you're effectively not leaving your site on Dreamhost and not your local machine. If you have Tomcat running on Dreamhost (if they do that), you might just need to point your NeatlineMaps to your actual domain.

If you can provide a few more details, we should be able to help you get up and running...

Wayne

Posted 3 years ago Permalink
Shawn
Member

Replying to @Wayne Graham's post:

Hi Wayne,

Thank you for responding!

My omeka & neatline are on dreamhost. Following the geoserver instructions (and the screenshots on neatline), it looked as if geoserver had to be on my local machine. This struck me as probably wrong, so I looked into putting it onto my server space with dreamhost - which took me to Tomcat, which caused me to melt down in fear...

So I guess I have two tasks ahead of me: installing tomcat on my dreamhost space, and then installing geoserver there too?

Alternatively, can this be done with geoserver running on my office machine? Presumably, it's got to be connected to the internet all the time, ie a proper server...

Posted 3 years ago Permalink
Wayne Graham
Member
Best Answer

It's possible to do this, though not recommended. Basically you'll need the the IP address of your work computer and pass that to the NeatlineMaps plugins (e.g. 192.168.1.101:8080/geoserver). This can cause some issues because most likely the IP address of your work computer is dynamically allocated and can change, so you'd need to be updating the location of your Geoserver from time-to-time. There are also institutions that block traffic on certain ports (including port 8080, the default Tomcat port). There are ways around this, but you're getting in to some pretty advanced configuration.

Setting up Tomcat can be quite a pain (I'm not even sure if it's available on Dreamhost), but once you have it running, you can just drop the Geoserver war in your webapps directory. I will note that I'm working with a hosting company (Acugis) right now for a one-click installer for Omeka, Neatline, and Geoserver. I was able to set this up even without it in about 5 minutes (but I have a lot of scripts to automate this since I do it so often) on their system.

If you do have a spare "server" computer you can use in your office, be sure to check out the OpenGeo suite community edition (http://opengeo.org/products/suite/community/) which makes installing/managing Geoserver really simple. I'm running this on both Ubuntu and CentOS and it works like a champ (only install the opengeo-geoserver package though).

Wayne

Posted 3 years ago Permalink
Shawn
Member

Replying to @Wayne Graham's post:

Ah, thank you. Acugis looks good, but for the experimenting etc that I'm doing, I don't think I want to be paying $25/month.

A bit of random googling suggested that Amazon Web Services might be a way to go, too http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/gettingstarted/latest/awsgsg-freetier/deploy-sample-app.html

These guys seem to do it too, for cheap- https://openshift.redhat.com/app/

...and with dreamhost, one has to switch to their virtual private machine premium service in order to run tomcat. Perhaps that's the simplest option, as I'm already with them...

I do have a spare computer lying around... or rather, I did, but it seems to have died. Darn.

Have you had any experience with AWS?

Posted 3 years ago Permalink
James Smithies
Member

A Twitter thread on this topic brought this to my attention. People might find http://academicami.org useful for this. As the site description suggests, the AMIs aren't configured for production sites, but they're fine for getting Omeka + Neatline + Geoserver up and running for familiarisation and testing purposes. People with a few sysadmin skills could harden them easily enough for prod purposes if necessary, I guess.

The Geoserver AMI can be found at http://academicami.org/category/gis/.

Posted 3 years ago Permalink
Wayne Graham
Member

Shawn,

I've used James' AMI on Amazon, and it works like a champ. There's also the OpenGeo Cloud edition, but it starts out around $95/month. One thing about AWS though, it can be a bit confusing, and gets expensive pretty quick if you're doing anything other than your own personal stuff. We have been helping (mostly graduate students) set up James' AMI on EC2 accounts on the dev tier. The awesome thing is that RDS has a dev tier as well, so you don't have to run your database locally.

VPS solutions are great, and I've used both linode (http://www.linode.com/) and Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com/). The nice thing is that you can (generally) very quickly add more memory/cpu power if you need it.

The tradeoffs here are in the administration of the system. If you're comfortable with configuring and tuning Tomcat, VPS or AWS are a good choice. If you would just as soon not worry about what -XX:+UseParallelGC does and let someone else worry about that, the hosted solution is a great option.

James, great AMI by the way. Saves a lot of time remembering the various PHP package names that need to be installed...

Wayne

Posted 3 years ago Permalink
Shawn
Member

Replying to @Wayne Graham's post:

Hi James, Hi Wayne,

Thank you both. A lot of stuff to mull over here! I'll start with James' AMI and then see what happens from there...

Posted 3 years ago Permalink

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