[MapServer-dev] RFC-140 - MapServer Homepage
Lime, Steve D (MNIT)
steve.lime at state.mn.us
Tue Mar 11 09:46:22 PDT 2025
The path after the binary name is available to you through an environment variable (PATH_INFO) as part of normal web server processing. We leverage that for OGC API support. In this case, you’d just look at the first component of the PATH_INFO and see if it matches your keyword (e.g. homepage) and then process accordingly (if enabled). Otherwise the first component of PATH_INFO is interpreted as the mapfile (more typically the mapfile alias) – Seth added that support in 8.2 (I think).
From: Richard Greenwood <richard.greenwood at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2025 11:35 AM
To: Lime, Steve D (MNIT) <steve.lime at state.mn.us>
Cc: Daniel Morissette <dmorissette at mapgears.com>; mapserver-dev at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [MapServer-dev] RFC-140 - MapServer Homepage
On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 8:47 AM Lime, Steve D (MNIT) via MapServer-dev <mapserver-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:mapserver-dev at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:
One idea might be to support a more restful URL, e.g. https://myhost.com/cgi-bin/mapserv/homepage (or /home or /index or ?) instead of using a parameter-based approach. Maybe that endpoint name could be configurable via the config file – and that could also enable the functionality.
Steve, correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems like it's getting into the realm of the web server. Like how is the mapserv binary to know that it should look for, and process, stuff after the "/"? What happens for example with "cgi-bin/mapserv.fcgi/homepage"? Does Apache know that I want to run the mapserv binary in fcgi mode and also know to pass the "homepage" part to the binary as a parameter? I like the idea of a restful syntax but I can't get my head around the implementation.
Rich
From: MapServer-dev <mapserver-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:mapserver-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org>> On Behalf Of Daniel Morissette via MapServer-dev
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2025 4:58 PM
To: mapserver-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:mapserver-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [MapServer-dev] RFC-140 - MapServer Homepage
Hi everyone,
Sorry for being late with my feedback. I like the RFC overall, but was wondering if we could find a better trigger than mode=config for this feature. My first reaction when I saw mode=config was that this mode could be used to deal with the actual config settings in the future if we ever want to go there so using mode=config today for this homepage feature could limit our future options. That being said, I couldn't find any good names other than mode=homepage to match the MS_HOMEPAGE_TEMPLATE_DIRECTORY variable that controls it.
I can live with mode=config if we have no better option and am +1 with the RFC otherwise.
Daniel
On 2025-03-09 11:57, Seth G via MapServer-dev wrote:
Hi all,
I've added in the feedback from the comments above to RFC 140 [1], see diff of changes at [2].
I'd like to now formally propose to adopt this RFC, starting with my +1.
Seth
[1] https://mapserver.org/development/rfc/ms-rfc-140.html
[2] https://github.com/MapServer/MapServer-documentation/pull/1000/files
--
web:https://geographika.net<https://geographika.net/> & https://mapserverstudio.net<https://mapserverstudio.net/>
mastodon: @geographika at mastodon.social<mailto:geographika at mastodon.social>
On Wed, Jan 22, 2025, at 4:40 PM, Tom Kralidis wrote:
Thanks Seth.
RE: service-meta: I would still keep to the link conventions (proper media type for "type", we could add a custom "service-type=WMS" property), and include an href as well.
..Tom
On Wed, Jan 22, 2025 at 10:27 AM Seth G <sethg at geographika.co.uk<mailto:sethg at geographika.co.uk>> wrote:
Thanks Tom - that pygeoapi pull request is good timing!
After reviewing and reading some of the associated documents, I'm planning to update the RFC with the notes below.
pygeoapi has implemented a JSON service for their homepage at [1] (pull request at [2].
This implements the api-catalog, a draft IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standard [3].
The Link Set format is described at [4]. It is proposed this approach is used to generate JSON for a MapServer "homepage".
The generated JSON format can be seen at https://demo.pygeoapi.io/api-catalog.json, with an extract below:
{
"linkset": [
{
"anchor": "https://demo.pygeoapi.io/master",
"service-desc": [
{
"href": "https://demo.pygeoapi.io/master/openapi?f=json",
"title": "pygeoapi - latest GitHub 'master' version (JSON)",
"type": "application/vnd.oai.openapi+json"
}
],
"service-doc": [
{
"href": "https://demo.pygeoapi.io/master/openapi?f=html",
"title": "pygeoapi - latest GitHub 'master' version (HTML)",
"type": "text/html"
}
]
},
The spec allows for an additional "service-meta" property "used to link to additional metadata about the API,
and is primarily intended for machine consumption." I think this can be used to add any additional properties from Mapfiles
we'd need to generate a MapServer homepage.
"service-doc" isn't mandatory, so WxS service links can ignore this. An example of the proposed JSON and metadata is shown below:
{
"linkset": [
{
"anchor": "https://demo.mapserver.org/",
"service-desc": [
{
"href": "https://demo.mapserver.org/cgi-bin/msautotest?SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.3.0&REQUEST=GetCapabilities",
"title": "World WMS service",
"type": "text/xml"
}
],
"service-meta": {
{
"type": "wms",
"title": "WMS demo server for MapServer, used in the msautotest suite",
"keywords": ["layers", "list"],
"mapfile": "msautotest.map",
}
}
},
Seth
[1] https://demo.pygeoapi.io/
[2] https://github.com/geopython/demo.pygeoapi.io/pull/60/files
[3] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpapi-api-catalog/08/
[4] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9264.html
--
web:https://geographika.net<https://geographika.net/> & https://mapserverstudio.net<https://mapserverstudio.net/>
mastodon: @geographika at mastodon.social<mailto:geographika at mastodon.social>
On Sun, Jan 19, 2025, at 5:10 PM, Tom Kralidis wrote:
Seth: thanks for this RFC. IETF has api-catalog (draft, [1]) which I think would be a good candidate for this RFC. This is also an item for review in the OGC API - Records SWG [2].
Overall it looks pretty close to the RFC proposal. We can consider using api-catalog as a baseline and we can extend the JSON accordingly as needed for anything specific to our needs.
Cheers
..Tom
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpapi-api-catalog
[2] https://github.com/opengeospatial/ogcapi-records/issues/355
On Sat, Jan 18, 2025 at 5:39 PM Seth G via MapServer-dev <mapserver-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:mapserver-dev at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:
Looking again at the landing page JSON at https://demo.mapserver.org/cgi-bin/mapserv/localdemo/ogcapi?f=json it is in the same format, so as you suggested could simply be expanded with links to WxS services, or even CGI generated responses. This would also more easily allow template reuse.
Seth
--
web:https://geographika.net<https://geographika.net/> & https://mapserverstudio.net<https://mapserverstudio.net/>
mastodon: @geographika at mastodon.social
On Sat, Jan 18, 2025, at 11:33 PM, Seth G via MapServer-dev wrote:
> Hi Even,
>
> Thanks for your valuable feedback.
>
> The homepage would be a "superset" of all available Mapfiles in a
> MapServer deployment, as listed in the CONFIG file. Each individual
> Mapfile would still have its own OGC API landing page, so the homepage
> is best described as a directory of all landing pages.
>
> As most MapServer deployments will likely be serving out a combination
> of WxS and new OGC API services for some time to come, it will allow
> both types to be listed together (I'm unaware of a OGC API spec that
> would cover this).
>
> In regard to the JSON used for links, I was modelling it as closely as
> possible to OGC API conventions. Looking at the pygeoapi demo home
> page, it provides a set of links in a common format, so I'll likely
> switch to this format/approach:
>
> https://demo.pygeoapi.io/stable?f=json
>
> A few of the "rel" values are defined as below, and can be reused:
>
> alternate Provides an alternate representation (e.g., HTML version of a
> resource).
> service-desc Links to the machine-readable API description (e.g.,
> OpenAPI JSON).
> service-doc Links to the human-readable API documentation (e.g.,
> OpenAPI HTML).
> conformance Lists the standards and conformance classes supported by
> the API.
>
> I'll update the RFC with the above,
>
> Seth
>
> --
> web:https://geographika.net<https://geographika.net/> & https://mapserverstudio.net<https://mapserverstudio.net/>
> mastodon: @geographika at mastodon.social
>
> On Sat, Jan 18, 2025, at 12:39 PM, Even Rouault wrote:
>> Seth,
>>
>> Thanks for putting this together. I'm wondering how much your proposal
>> relates/intersects with the concept of the landing page of OGC API
>> services ? You mention some connection with it, but it is not
>> immediately clear to me the exact nature of the connection. Perhaps it
>> is just a matter of clarifying. I have put zero thoughts in it, but it
>> would feel weird to invent a MapServer specific thing, so I'm naively
>> wondering if we can't we just adopt the landing page formalism (for the
>> JSON part), and potentially extend it by exposing old WxS services as
>> well in the links as you suggest? I'm also wondering if there's some
>> best practice used by other projects on how to expose for things like
>>
>> {
>> "href":
>> "https://demo.mapserver.org/cgi-bin/wms?SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.3.0&REQUEST=GetCapabilities",
>> "title": "GetCapabilities",
>> "type": "WMS"
>> },
>>
>> so they can be interoperably consumed.
>>
>> Even
>>
>> Le 18/01/2025 à 09:11, Seth G via MapServer-dev a écrit :
>>> Hi devs,
>>>
>>> I've drafted an RFC with an approach of creating a MapServer homepage based on the MAPs referenced in a mapserver.conf file. This will allow MapServer installations to easily advertise available services, dynamically.
>>>
>>> Text available in pull request at https://github.com/MapServer/MapServer-documentation/pull/996
>>>
>>> Comments and thoughts appreciated,
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Seth
>>>
>>> --
>>> web:https://geographika.net<https://geographika.net/> & https://mapserverstudio.net<https://mapserverstudio.net/>
>>> mastodon: @geographika at mastodon.social
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> MapServer-dev mailing list
>>> MapServer-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:MapServer-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
>>> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-dev
>>
>> --
>> http://www.spatialys.com<http://www.spatialys.com/>
>> My software is free, but my time generally not.
>> Butcher of all kinds of standards, open or closed formats. At the end,
>> this is just about bytes.
> _______________________________________________
> MapServer-dev mailing list
> MapServer-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:MapServer-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-dev
_______________________________________________
MapServer-dev mailing list
MapServer-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:MapServer-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-dev
_______________________________________________
MapServer-dev mailing list
MapServer-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:MapServer-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-dev
--
Daniel Morissette
Mapgears Inc
T: +1 418-696-5056 #201
_______________________________________________
MapServer-dev mailing list
MapServer-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:MapServer-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-dev
--
Richard W. Greenwood
www.greenwoodmap.com<http://www.greenwoodmap.com/>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/mapserver-dev/attachments/20250311/ad1cfbbc/attachment-0001.htm>
More information about the MapServer-dev
mailing list