[GIS] Serving MBTiles with Geoserver plugin

geoservermbtilestileswms

I'm creating a webmap, and hoping to add a few basemap/raster layers of my own. I'll be using a stack that includes GeoServer which is fine for vector data, but I'd like to serve the new basemap layers through GeoServer as well, and I'm having trouble finding the best way to do that. I'd like to use .mbtiles files that I create with TileMill, because they look good and are easy to style. The goal is to create a WMS from these tiles.

I've added the MBTiles plugin to my GeoServer 2.6.1 installation on an Amazon EC2 instance, and transferred the .mbtiles file to the GeoServer data directory. However, when I go to add the new MBTiles data store, it seems to create a data store, but when I try to create a new layer using that data store, the interface doesn't respond. It's as if GeoServer doesn't recognize the MBTiles data store correctly.

I'm very new to this, so I'm probably missing something, but I've read a lot of documentation and can't figure it out.

Best Answer

To summarise the discussion:

When adding extensions (including community modules) to GeoServer, it is very important to use the version of the extension that matches the build of GeoServer. Don't use an earlier or later version, even if there is a link in the documentation that suggests using "nightly" builds of an extension on a stable / released GeoServer.
The zip file version of the extension should contain the required dependencies for that module. You need to install all of those (unless, of course, you already have the dependency installed, e.g. from installing another extension that had some of the same dependencies).
There are a couple of special cases, where one extension requires another extension. An example is that the GeoPackage community module requires the WPS extension. You should check the documentation for the module you're installing in case it has special cases like this.

The distinction between extensions and community modules is really about how it is supported, and doesn't suggest different interfaces or other technical differences. Installation follows the same rules.

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I was able to fix this in mbtiles-php tileserver.php by adding this call:

header('Cache-Control: max-age=3600');

when serving out the image tiles. I have no idea of the wisdom of this, although I did notice that in both the Leaflet and Mapbox examples that I point to above, they have similar 'Cache-Control' HTTP headers on the PNG tiles they serve. Here is the relevant diff:

244a245
>         header('Cache-Control: max-age=3600');
259a261
>         header('Cache-Control: max-age=3600');

Please let me know if this is a bad idea.

Best Answer

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