GeoServer Printing Module¶
The printing module for GeoServer allows easy hosting of the Mapfish
printing service within a GeoServer instance. The Mapfish printing module
provides an HTTP API for printing that is useful within JavaScript mapping
applications. User interface components for interacting with the print service
are available from the Mapfish and GeoExt projects.
Reference:
https://mapfish.github.io/mapfish-print-v2/ (mapfish-print-lib documentation)
Installation¶
Visit the website download page, locate your release, and download: geoserver-2.24.x-printing-plugin.zip
Extract the contents of the ZIP archive into the
/WEB-INF/lib/in the GeoServer webapp. For example, if you have installed the GeoServer binary to/opt/geoserver/, the printing extension JAR files should be placed in/opt/geoserver/webapps/geoserver/WEB-INF/lib/.After extracting the extension, restart GeoServer in order for the changes to take effect. All further configuration can be done with GeoServer running.
Verifying Installation¶
On the first startup after installation, GeoServer should create a print module
configuration file in GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR/printing/config.yaml.
Eventually it’s possible to specify an external path where the config.yaml
file is located through a JVM or ENV variable called GEOSERVER_PRINT_CONFIG_DIR.
The name of the file config.yaml cannot be changed; it will be possible to
specify eventually the folder when this is located.
e.g.
-DGEOSERVER_PRINT_CONFIG_DIR=/tmp/ext_printing
allows the module searching the configuration file into the external folder
/tmp/ext_printing/config.yaml
Checking for this file’s existence is a quick way to verify the module is installed properly. It is safe to edit this file; in fact there is currently no way to modify the print module settings other than by opening this configuration file in a text editor.
If the module is installed and configured properly, then you will also be able to retrieve a list of configured printing parameters from http://localhost:8080/geoserver/pdf/info.json . This service must be working properly for JavaScript clients to use the printing service.
Finally, you can test printing in this sample page. You can load it directly to attempt to produce a
map from a GeoServer running at http://localhost:8080/geoserver/. If you are
running at a different host and port, you can download the file and
modify it with your HTML editor of choice to use the proper URL.
Warning
This sample script points at the development version of GeoExt. You can modify it for production use, but if you are going to do so you should also host your own, minified build of GeoExt and OpenLayers. The libraries used in the sample are subject to change without notice, so pages using them may change behavior without warning.