Whether you are using GeoServer on Tomcat or you used the Windows installer that incorporates a Jetty instance, it is not a good idea to expose it directly to your users, especially if they are on the internet. A safer option is to use a more stable web server, such as Apache HTTPD--one of the most popular and widely used web servers across the web. To expose GeoServer, or more generally, a Java application from the web server, you need to set a proxy on the web server. Users will point to an alias and their requests will be redirected to Tomcat, more safely deployed in a protected LAN.
We will configure the Apache HTTP web server to act as a proxy for GeoServer. First of all, we need to get it working; you will learn that, just like many other open source projects, this is surprisingly simple! Perform the following steps:
- To install Apache on Linux, you can use...
