Installing GeoNetwork on a server

  1. Install the dependencies:

    #apt install openjdk-8-jre-headless tomcat8 postgis

Using -headless on openjdk-8-jre is important because that prevents APT from installing a whole desktop environment as a dependency.

  1. Switch to the postgres user to configure your database

    #su postgres

  2. Create your database

    $createdb -O postgres gn -E utf-8

  3. Enable PostGIS and PostGIS topology on your database.

    $psql -U postgres -d gn -c ‘CREATE EXTENSION postgis’ $psql -U postgres -d gn -c ‘CREATE EXTENSION postgis_topology’

  4. Set a password on the postgres account.

    $psql =#\password postgres

  5. Download geonetwork.war version 3.44, outside the postgres account.

    $exit $wget https://versaweb.dl.sourceforge.net/project/geonetwork/GeoNetwork_opensource/v3.4.4/geonetwork.war Make sure this is placed in /var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/, so Tomcat will now where to look for it.

From now on I will refer to /var/lib/tomcat8/ as “$TOMCAT”.

  1. Edit $TOMCAT/webapps/geonetwork/WEB-INF/config-node/srv.xml, to tell it to use PostGIS.

a. Comment out <import resource="../config-db/h2.xml"/> b. Uncomment <import resource="../config-db/postgres-postgis.xml"/>.

  1. Edit $TOMCAT/webapps/geonetwork/WEB-INF/config-db/jdbc.properties, to configure the correct user account.

Change the values for jdbc.username and jdbc.password to match what you configured earlier.

  1. Download to extension to server
  2. unarchive it with unzip. You may need to install unzip, because gunzip won’t work.
  3. Copy the directory to $TOMCAT/webapps/geonetwork/WEB-INF/data/config/schema_plugins/ , and change the owner to tomcat8

  4. Restart tomcat

    #systemctl restart tomcat8.service

You may need to place some .jar files in $TOMCAT/webapps/geonetwork/WEB-INF/lib/ .

  1. Now install nginx in order to use it to optimize and secure public requests to the Tomcat server.

    #sudo apt install nginx

If you want you may test that this works by pointing your browser to this server, without specifying a port. You should get message telling you that nginx is running successfully.

  1. Edit /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default to tell it to pass requests on to Tomcat.

Replace the location / block with:

location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
}

  1. Restart nginx.

    #systemctl restart nginx.service