[QGIS-Developer] QGIS Server and Desktop on same machine in production?

[pathmapper]

Thanks Alessandro, also for the funny example of the guy with his 
personal computer server :)

The idea was to automate one or two processing steps on the server to 
update an OWS service regularly.

> I don't know how qgis_process is packaged but I don't see a reason why
> it would not run under the same server setup, it will just probably
> require xvfb-run before calling it.

Right, the following is working under a server setup:

xvfb-run --auto-servernum --server-num=1 qgis_process

Cheers,
Bjoern





On 10.06.2021 15:01, Alessandro Pasotti wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 2:48 PM pathmapper <pathmapper at posteo.de>
> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I would like to use processing from the command line
>> 
> (https://docs.qgis.org/3.16/en/docs/user_manual/processing/standalone.html
>> [1])
>> on the same Ubuntu machine where QGIS server is running:
>> 
>> Every information I did find so far says to install QGIS Desktop to
>> have
>> qgis_process available, but the training manual states:
>> 
>> "QGIS Server should be used in production without QGIS Desktop
>> (with the
>> accompanying X Server) installed on the same machine."
>> 
>> Source:
>> 
> https://docs.qgis.org/3.16/en/docs/training_manual/qgis_server/install.html#moderate-fa-install-from-packages
>> [2]
>> 
>> Is this recommendation still valid, and if yes, why?
> 
> That recommendation has never been valid from a technical point of
> view.
> 
> That said, it is not common nor recommended to perform common desktop
> operations on a production server, I've seen only a single example of
> such weird promiscuity in my whole career, in particular, that was a
> guy working for a public administration and the production server was
> his personal computer standing on his desktop.
> 
> For this reason all the documentation you will find assumes that the
> server is running on a headless server without X-Window running
> because that's what you will normally find with only a few very rare
> exceptions and it is not wise to do differently.
> 
> I don't know how qgis_process is packaged but I don't see a reason why
> it would not run under the same server setup, it will just probably
> require xvfb-run before calling it.
> 
> --
> 
> Alessandro Pasotti
> QCooperative:  www.qcooperative.net [3]
> ItOpen:   www.itopen.it [4]
> 
> Links:
> ------
> [1] 
> https://docs.qgis.org/3.16/en/docs/user_manual/processing/standalone.html
> [2]
> https://docs.qgis.org/3.16/en/docs/training_manual/qgis_server/install.html#moderate-fa-install-from-packages
> [3] https://www.qcooperative.net
> [4] http://www.itopen.it