Installation

Getting ncWMS

ncWMS can be downloaded as either a Java webapp (to be run in a servlet container such as Tomcat), or as a standalone Java application. Generally speaking, the webapp version is recommended for most uses. However, the standalone version is recommended for users who wish to only use ncWMS on their own machine for exploring data, or for testing ncWMS to explore its functionality prior to installing the webapp version.

The latest release of ncWMS can be downloaded here.

Standalone version

The standalone version of ncWMS requires no installation. It can be run from the command-line with the command java -jar ncWMS2-standalone.jar . This will run the WMS server locally with no security for administration and configuration. It will be available at http://localhost:8080/. All configuration data is stored in a directory named .ncWMS2 in the home directory of the user running the software.

Servlet Container

ncWMS is a Java servlet which runs on a servlet container such as Tomcat, JBoss, or Glassfish. Tomcat is the recommended servlet container and is what ncWMS is written and tested on. Installation is servlet-container dependent, but there are no ncWMS-specific procedures for installation.

Servlet-level Configuration

Once ncWMS is up-and-running, on first launch it will create a configuration file and logging directory. By default this is located in a directory named .ncWMS2 in the home directory of the user running the servlet container. Note that the user running the servlet container must have write access to their home directory. This is not always the case for system users such as tomcat7 or nobody.

To change the location of the server configuration, you need to redefine the context parameter configDir. To do this on Tomcat, you should create a file named $CATALINA_BASE/conf/[enginename]/[hostname]/[webappname].xml. For example, with the default webapp name running on localhost this is $CATALINA_BASE/conf/Catalina/localhost/ncWMS2.xml. Below is an example config with several options set, including configDir:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<Context>
    <Parameter name="configDir" value="$HOME/.ncWMS2-testserver" override="false"/>
    <Parameter name="paletteDirs" value="$HOME/.ncWMS2-testserver/palettes" override="false"/>
    <Parameter name="styleDirs" value="$HOME/.ncWMS2-testserver/styles" override="false"/>
    <Parameter name="defaultPalette" value="[whatever]" override="false"/>
    <Parameter name="advertisedPalettes" value="[whatever]" override="false"/>
</Context>

Note that $HOME represents the home directory of the user running the servlet container and is a special value - other environment variables cannot be used here. Since this setting is at the servlet container level, it will persist across redeploys of ncWMS2.

Security configuration

Security for the administration of ncWMS is delegated to the servlet container (in standalone mode there is no security on any administration). You should define a security role with the name ncWMS-admin, and add users with that role. To do this on Tomcat, you could add the following to tomcat-users.xml:

<role rolename="ncWMS-admin" />
<user username="admin" password="ncWMS-password" roles="ncWMS-admin"/>

Access to the administration interface would then be granted to a user with the name admin and the password ncWMS-password

Docker version

Quickstart

$ docker run \
    -d \
    -p 80:8080 \
    -p 443:8443 \
    -v /path/to/a/config.xml:/usr/local/tomcat/.ncWMS2/config.xml
    guygriffiths/ncwms

Note: -v arguments require absolute path.

Production

$ docker run \
    -d \
    -p 80:8080 \
    -v /path/to/your/tomcat-users.xml:/usr/local/tomcat/conf/tomcat-users.xml \
    -v /path/to/your/ncwms/config/directory:/usr/local/tomcat/.ncWMS2 \
    -e "ADVERTISED_PALETTES=div-RdBu,div-RdBu-inv,seq-cubeYF" \
    -e "DEFAULT_PALETTE=div-RdBu" \
    --name ncwms \
    guygriffiths/ncwms

Configuration

Tomcat

See these instructions for configuring Tomcat

ncWMS

Mount your own config directory:

$ docker run \
    -v /path/to/your/ncwms/config/directory:/usr/local/tomcat/.ncWMS2 \
    ... \
    guygriffiths/ncwms

Set your own default palette

$ docker run \
    -e "DEFAULT_PALETTE=seq-BuYl" \
    ... \
    guygriffiths/ncwms

Set your own advertised palettes

$ docker run \
    -e "ADVERTISED_PALETTES=div-RdBu,div-RdBu-inv,seq-cubeYF" \
    ... \
    guygriffiths/ncwms

JMX

You can set the JMX_OPTS environmental variable when running the docker container to enable JMX. Port 9090 is exposed via the Dockerfile but you can use whichever port you would like.

$ docker run \
    -e "JMX_OPTS=-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.rmi.port=9090 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote=true -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=9090 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.local.only=false -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=0.0.0.0" \
    ... \
    guygriffiths/ncwms

Users

By default, Tomcat will start with two user accounts. The passwords are equal to the user name.

• ncwms - used to admin ncWMS
• admin - can be used by everything else (has full privileges)