Go On board with a GeoNetwork Container

GeoNetwork is a FOSS catalog for geospatial information. It is used around the world by organizations such as FAO, the Dutch Kadaster or Eurostat, just to mention a few.

As any software service, it may not be trivial to install and configure, which may put people away for giving it a try. This could change with docker.

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Docker, which could be defined in a nutshell as infrastructure as code, automates the deployment of Linux applications inside software containers. It relies in a technology, LXC, which provides operating-system-level virtualization on Linux. In less than four years it experienced a massive adoption by the software community, and it has already been taken to production in many use cases.

The docker hub is a massive repository for ready-to-use images. You can find anything from web servers to databases, or even actual operative systems. With a docker pull at the tip of your fingers, you can have them running in your computer in a matter of minutes (depending on your internet connection).

Anyone can upload their docker images to docker hub, but there are some images which are released “officially”.
Official images sources live in the docker repositories, and they are considered good to use (and reuse), because they implement docker best practices, and therefore their code can be seen as an example. They are also heavily documented according to some standards, and they go through a security audit.

Although there are a couple of geonetwork images on the docker repositories, there is no official image yet, so I decided to create one. While the image goes through the approval process, I decided to publish it anyway, so that anyone can benefit from it in the meantime.

These images provides the two latest releases of geonetwork (3.0.5 and 3.2.0), as well as the previous release (3.0.4). By default, geonetwork runs on a local h2 database, but I created a variant which can use a postgresql database as backend, either running on a container or on a bare metal server. This should make it more fit for production.

You can read more about these and other features, such as setting and persisting the data directory, on the docker hub page.

Once the official images get released I will make an announcement here. But in the meantime, there is no excuse to not start playing with geonetwork:

docker pull geocat/geonetwork

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Have fun with docker & Geonetwork !?