[mapserver-users] dynamic ows_serviceurl

[Bjørn Ove Grøtan]

Paul via MapServer-users:
> Thanx for the suggestions Kaido, Seth, Steve. Updating the mapfile at
> deployment indeed is a better option then the querystring approach, let me
> verify what scripting options (sed?) i have on our docker image. 

If you omit setting the ows_onlineresource (just try to commend it out) in the
.map-file, mapserver will dynamically use the path (e.g. domain) it was reached
by. Thus you can have the same mapfile on dev, test, qa or production and they
will have individual domains. If you reach the server-instance, it will use the
server-name (and port) rather than the proxied domain, but then it will be
easier to problem shoot individual server instances using plain gis-tools that
utilize metadata such as ows_onlineresource.

We tested this some years ago, and have the following expereience using a reverse proxy in front of a mapserver cluster:
http -> http   ows_onlineresource will use http://whatever.domain.reached.by.frontend.com/path/to/mapservice
https -> https will use https://whatever.domain.reached.by.frontend.com/path/to/mapservice
https -> http (ssl-offloading) will unfortunately use http://blablabla, even if we set forward proto and forwarded port on the proxy-end.

It would be nice if mapserver could use an ssl-offloading proxy, be it haproxy,
nginx or something else. So, the ows_onlineresource-problem was solved for us
by having a fail-over frontend holding the domains, and different
mapserver-clusters for load balancing and fail-over - we just had to live with
configuring certificates also for the backend servers for the different environments (domains).

-- 
Kind regards
 
Bjørn Ove Grøtan