[mapserver-users] dynamic ows_serviceurl

[Steve Lime]

Hi Paul: The idea of referencing environment variables has come up before.
Another example would be to leverage settings injected into cloud
deployments as environment variables (I think there's an old ticket that
was recently re-opened on the topic). I'm not sure what the best way to
handle this would be. One possibility would be using a mechanism similar to
runtime subs where you'd reference the variables within the mapfile using
${variable} or whatever. Another idea would be to use a pre-processor of
some sort to "compile" a mapfile from the environment. The latter would
result in better performance since you'd generate the resulting file once
and could also do things like inlining included snippets. This
functionality would be helpful for the cloud deployments, simplifying
deployments in multiple (dev, test, prod) environments and for keeping
secrets out of repos altogether.

We're putzing around with the pre-processing idea a bit but haven't gotten
anything fully baked. Others?

-Steve

On Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 4:56 AM Paul via MapServer-users <
mapserver-users at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

> hi list, this has probably been discussed before, but maybe there are
> updates (on v8?)
>
> we would like to extract the ows_onlineresource from the environment,
> instead of having an administrator to configure it on the mapfile
>
> currently we implement a hack where the webserver layer sends an
> additional query parameter `ows_url` to mapserver which contains the
> current url
>
> in the mapfile this is implemented as
>
> ```
>
> WEB    VALIDATION      "ows_url" "(\b(https?|ftp|file)://)?[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%?=~_|!:,.;]+[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%=~_|]"    END        METADATA      "ows_onlineresource"               "%ows_url%"    ENDEND
>
> ```
>
> I wonder if others run into similar challenges, or if there are much more
> simple best practices for this case.
>
> I can imagine allowing a environment parameter 'proxy-url' like geoserver
> would make sense, but it should allow some kind of template, eg:
>
> ```
> PROXY-URL https://example.com/cgi-bin/mapserv?map={map}.map
> ```
>
> which in our case would be
>
> ```
> PROXY-URL https://example.com/cgi-bin/{map}
> ```
>
> Thank you, Paul.
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