vagrant Archives • North River Geographic Systems Inc

I went through a year or so of not talking at conferences. For local ones I’d show up and do something. I taught a workshop at FOSS4GNA 2018. I did a workshop at FOSS4G 2017 in Boston (and it sorta sucked). I need to get out of that mode and talk more – but I’m happier being quiet these days and working with clients.

Anyway – at FOSS4GNA 2018 I discovered something – the OSGEO Suite had disappeared from Boundless’s Website and was replaced with a github repository. It wasn’t long after Don Meltz put up an excellent explanation of the OSGEO Suite. The OSGEO Suite being gone isn’t a problem. It does increase the amount of talking I have to do spend explaining it’s not a problem. I could even compile the suite – but my clients can’t. They are smart people – but the time to compile the boundless suite won’t be happening.

One of the things I keep running into is the idea of an Open Source Server. The OSGEO Suite was well known and I get people asking “Hey – can you set us up a geo server”. They mean the opengeo suite. I then launch into an explanation of what makes up a “geo server” and they go a bit blank and answer me “Yeah – one of those”.

So for the next bit I’m gonna be doing something like this:

I want to explain how this works to people. We’ve gotten a bit deaf by hearing “ArcServer” at every conference in TN as this one monolithic thing you have to install to make a web map…which really don’t need since AGOL appeared but…you want SDE and it’s not called that and you have two people editing but you need SQl Server but you don’t….

Anyway, QGIS/PostgreSQL/PostGIS I’ve installed multiple times and as of late I’m experimenting with geoserver and what it can/can’t do. I have no grand delusions of creating ‘Randy’s Open Geo Spatial Super Duper Server’. I want to get to the point where maybe mapserver is an option in this. So much to learn…so little time.

I suck at github – but I’ve been more active as I try to develop a skill set and get over the angst of pushing and pulling things. I’ve built a vagrant box to install PostGIS/PostgreSQL/Geoserver so I can have something to point at plus it gives me a starting point for an upcoming class I’m in the middle of building. The vagrant box isn’t pretty – I expect to change it over the next bit as it’s mostly pieced together from a lot of other people’s work (Coleman McCormick, Dave Smith, etc). It works though and I have everything but pgadmin 4 running in one spot. Which – I don’t think this is anywhere near “install this for a server” because this is mostly just for talking, training, and testing.

So why vagrant? Why not docker? I can gloss over vagrant faster at theses talks than I can docker. I have 16 minutes to draw diagrams and about 4 minutes to publish one piece of data: QGIS -> PostGIS -> Geoserver -> Leaflet.

Anyway – if you’re up for the possibility of a train wreck of a presentation come by the East Tennessee Meeting in Kingsport next week as I try to explain how this works and hopefully you get excited enough to install some or all of these components and do something cool with your data.

It was a snow day of sorts on January 29th 2014..

First off – I could start a whole tirade (and probably should) on the state of the GIS Profession. There is a lot of technology in play and unfortunately we don’t play enough with it. How many of you have worked with github? Vagrant? If I said Geojson would you go “what?” or point out it’s GeoJSON? Leaflet? Granted – I don’t do enough with technology because – well – we have to make money so it’s always a bit of a push to stay abreast of the tech…but if a client calls we need to be able to at least speak with some authority depending on the question.

I love open source software. I love GIS. I got a comment from Ivan Mincik on his GIS.Lab project after the opengeo blog post. I’ve installed enough software to know it can be painful. I once did a “sneaker net” install on something like 30 computers only to walk in the next day and find all 30 had been erased. So how would you roll out a GIS Lab quickly? I’m guessing that if you had the desire this could done in a windows environment – but linux is quite a bit more flexible (and free) and this works incredibly well.

So from the readme and all the docs at Ivan’s Github Page:

Key features:

super easy fully automatic deployment and maintenance – all operation are encapsulated in easy to use commands
nearly zero requirements for client machines – no operating system or software needed, no hard disk needed
no limit of number of client machines
100 percent real computer user experience – no thin client glitches
central management of all client OS images, user accounts and user data
every user can log in from any client machine to get his working environment
unbreakable client OS images – after every client reload you always get fresh OS environment
rich software equipment of client machines for internet browsing, email, chat, images and video, word, spreadsheet and presentation editing and more
out of box internet sharing from host machine to all client machines
out of box working file sharing service (NFS)
out of box database server (PostgreSQL/PostGIS)
Linux system security
great platform for studying open source technologies beginning from Linux OS, various system services and end user software
out of box working web GIS publishing solution

So you get Postgresql/PostGIS, QGIS, and QGIS Server. It’s pretty easy to get running. I won’t cover it in detail but you need to get vagrant installed and download Ivan’s Code from github. Grab a vagrant box (canonical’s 12.04 LTS release) and essentially 1 command later – “Vagrant up” and you are on your way. Vagrant takes some of the pain in deploying a testing environment. Thought a series of scripts and configuration files you can “build” a repeatable setup in just a few minutes.

I used virtualbox to simulate a diskless client (computer with no hard drive). I now have this running with a QGIS project and web map. The client runs off 1gb of RAM.

You have a low cost lab with a very easy setup. If you have at least one decent computer to install vagrant on you can set up a bunch of thin clients (i.e. computers with no disk drives, laptops, etc) to display the lab. Great for education, emergencies, or training.Share data with QGIS server amongst the lab participants.

So for all of you out there how useful is this setup? ~~I know probably not for production mapping work~~. Actually – it’s quite possible to do production mapping work on this. For education? For an emergency? For a day of teaching people how/what to map as opposed to worrying about licensing/installation issues. I think pretty good. Ivan said this is still under heavy development. I think I installed the pre .3 GIS.lab to get this running and only had a couple of hiccups.

Go forth – Learn!