Configuring Stale-While-Revalidate Tile Caching
How to serve map tiles from cache instantly while a stale entry is refreshed in the background, so viewers never wait on a cache miss or a slow…
Read the guide
Open-Source Geospatial Portal
Deployment & Scaling
Deploy, scale, secure, and maintain open-source geospatial platforms.
Running an open-source geospatial portal in production is a systems problem, not a single install. This is a practical, operations-first reference for the teams who keep GeoNode, MapProxy, TileServer GL and the wider OGC stack online — GIS administrators, open-source maintainers, platform engineers, and government technology teams.
Every guide is written for the realities of scale: zero-trust security boundaries, reproducible infrastructure-as-code, automated metadata pipelines, and CI/CD deployment patterns that survive traffic spikes and regional outages. The material is organised into three areas, each drilling from architectural overview down to copy-ready configuration.
Start with a section below, or jump straight to a deep-dive. Code blocks are validated and copy-ready, navigation is cross-linked, and the whole site works offline once installed.
Start here
Flagship deep-dives — copy-ready configuration for the problems teams hit first in production.
Setting Up Fallback Tile Routing in Production
This guide walks through configuring a production reverse proxy so that tile requests degrade deterministically to a secondary backend when the primary…
Read the guideBuilding a Minimal TileServer GL Docker Image
A repeatable recipe for producing a small, non-root TileServer GL image whose config, styles, and tiles are mounted read-only and whose health is…
Read the guideDetecting Terraform Drift in GeoNode Infrastructure
How to catch out-of-band changes to GeoNode's cloud infrastructure by running a scheduled terraform plan in CI, comparing state to reality, and…
Read the guideAutomating OAI-PMH Harvesting
A step-by-step procedure for building a fault-tolerant, incremental OAI-PMH harvester that synchronizes metadata from distributed government agency…
Read the guideMapping ISO 19115 to Dublin Core for CSW
A crosswalk and transform for exposing rich ISO 19115/19139 source records as the flat Dublin Core csw:Record that a CSW GetRecords response must return.
Read the guideExplore the content
Core Portal Architecture & Security Boundaries
Deploying and scaling an open-source geospatial portal demands rigorous infrastructure design, strict service isolation, and continuous security…
- Fallback Routing Strategies for Tile Servers
- Operational Architecture Comparison
- Implementing RBAC for Multi-Tenant GIS Portals
- Keycloak vs Dex for OIDC Federation in Geospatial Portals
- Security Boundary Mapping for OGC Services
Infrastructure Orchestration & Config Management
Deploying and scaling an open-source geospatial portal demands a declarative, infrastructure-as-code discipline that governs every tier from the public…
- Containerizing TileServer GL for High Availability
- Environment Parity in Geospatial CI Pipelines
- Helm vs Kustomize for GeoNode Deployments
- Kubernetes StatefulSets for PostGIS Databases
- MapProxy vs TileServer GL for Tile Delivery
- Monitoring and Observability for Geospatial Portals
- Reverse Proxy Configuration for WMS/WFS
Metadata Catalog Automation & Ingestion Workflows
Within the wider open-source geospatial portal operations program, metadata catalog automation is the discoverability control plane: the subsystem that…
- Automated Metadata Ingestion via OAI-PMH
- CSW Catalog Schema Mapping & Validation
- Incremental Metadata Harvesting and Change Detection
- Scaling Celery Pipelines for Bulk Metadata Ingestion
- Search Indexing Optimization with Elasticsearch
- Spatial Data Versioning and Rollback Workflows
- Version Tagging & Sync for Spatial Datasets