Publishing GeoPackage to GeoServer Using QGIS

Recently, I had the occasion to attempt to generate an OGC GeoPackage from QGIS and publish it using GeoServer. The use case was fairly straightforward. I had been given data in GML format and needed to publish it. For many valid reasons (such as lack of spatial indexing), GeoServer does not natively support publishing GML data. As a result, I need to convert it to something that GeoServer did support.

QGIS opened and displayed the data easily and, from there, I could export it into any number of formats. (Or I could have used OGR.) The feature attributes had very long names and I didn’t want to lose that richness by exporting to shapefile. I was trying to keep my server-side life simple, so I was hoping to avoid setting up an RDBMS data store for this purpose. It was then that I noticed QGIS supports exporting to GeoPackge, so I decided to give it a go.

For purposes of this post, I am using a shapefile of building footprints of Leonardtown, Maryland. The process is the same for a GML file, however.

As shown below, you initiate the process like any other by right-clicking and choosing “Save As…” in the context menu.

qgis_post1

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Working with Node and the GeoServer REST Configuration API

I’ve been working with a mix of technologies lately that includes Node and GeoServer. I’ve recently begun integrating the two by using Node to manipulate GeoServer’s configuration through the REST API it provides for that purpose. One task I’ve been working on automating is the registration of vector layers stored in PostGIS with GeoServer to make them available via WMS, WFS, and the various other services provided by GeoServer.

geoserver_admin

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Getting Reacquainted With GeoServer

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to get back in touch with GeoServer. It used to figure more prominently in my toolbox but I got away from it because it simply didn’t factor into most of my project work. Time being a limited resource, it had to go on a shelf.

I’m working with GeoServer 2.6.1 this time around. I always found it to be easy to set up but it think the initial installation borders on trivial now. I was setting it up on an Ubuntu EC2 instance so the entire process was conducted from the command line. From start to finish, it took me about ten minutes, half of which was Tomcat configuration.

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