Installing the GeoServer GeoFence Server extension

Warning

the plugins geofence-server and geofence should not be both installed at the same time.

Please install either one according to your setup.

geofence-server will run the GeoFence engine internally, and you won’t need an external GeoFence webapp.

Select the plugin you need

GeoFence Server extension is provided as two mutually exclusive packages, to be used according to your setup:

  • geoserver-2.27.x-geofence-server-postgres-plugin.zip: (strongly recommended choice) contains all the libraries to run geofence-server, using as backend an externally configured PostgreSQL DB.

  • geoserver-2.27.x-geofence-server-h2-plugin.zip: contains all the libraries to run geofence-server, using as backend an embedded H2 DB.

    Warning

    this plugin will install a version of the H2 library that is not compatible with other plugins using H2 (e.g. grib/netcdf).

    This package is purely for demo purposes, allowing you to run the GeoFence plugin without the need to configure an external DB backend.

Install the plugin

  1. Visit the website download page, locate your release, and download either one of the packages listed above.

    The download link will be in the Extensions section under Other.

    Make sure to match the plugin version (e.g. 2.27-SNAPSHOT above) to the version of the GeoServer instance.

  2. Extract the files in this archive to the WEB-INF/lib directory of your GeoServer installation.

  3. Add the following system variable among the JVM startup options (location varies depending on installation type): -Dgwc.context.suffix=gwc to avoid conflicts with GWC pages.

  4. Configure the plugin

  5. Restart GeoServer

Configure the plugin

H2 configuration

If you are using the H2 flavour of the plugin, you don’t need to configure anything. By default, GeoFence will use H2 as a backend database and will work out of the box with the internal default configuration.

As reported above, you are strongly encouraged to move to PostgreSQL/PostGIS.

PostgreSQL configuration

In order to instruct GeoFence to use PostgreSQL, you need to create the file <DATADIR>/geofence/geofence-datasource-ovr.properties with a content like this:

geofenceVendorAdapter.databasePlatform=org.hibernate.spatial.dialect.postgis.PostgisDialect
geofenceDataSource.driverClassName=org.postgresql.Driver
geofenceDataSource.url=jdbc:postgresql://<HOST>:<PORT>/<DATABASE>
geofenceDataSource.username=<USERNAME>
geofenceDataSource.password=<PASSWORD>
geofenceEntityManagerFactory.jpaPropertyMap[hibernate.default_schema]=<SCHEMA>

# avoid hibernate transaction issues
geofenceDataSource.testOnBorrow=true
geofenceDataSource.validationQuery=SELECT 1
geofenceEntityManagerFactory.jpaPropertyMap[hibernate.testOnBorrow]=true
geofenceEntityManagerFactory.jpaPropertyMap[hibernate.validationQuery]=SELECT 1

Note

The PostgisDialect is deprecated and should be replaced according to the PostgreSQL version used. Please use the proper dialect as reported in the hibernate summary page

Note

By default GeoFence will create the initial schema or update the DB schema by itself when needed. In case you want to manage the schema by yourself, you may want to use the SQL file located here

Also, you need to set this property to validate (default value is update).

geofenceEntityManagerFactory.jpaPropertyMap[hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto]=validate

Other info

You may found other info about configuration in this GeoFence wiki page .

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