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GeoServer Printing Module

The printing module for GeoServer allows easy hosting of the Mapfish printing service within a GeoServer instance. The Mapfish printing module provides an HTTP API for printing that is useful within JavaScript mapping applications. User interface components for interacting with the print service are available from the Mapfish and GeoExt projects.

Reference:

Installation

  • Visit the website download page, locate your release, and download: geoserver-2.24.2-printing-plugin.zip (nightly geoserver-2.24-SNAPSHOT-printing-plugin.zip)
  • Extract the contents of the ZIP archive into the /WEB-INF/lib/ in the GeoServer webapp. For example, if you have installed the GeoServer binary to /opt/geoserver/, the printing extension JAR files should be placed in /opt/geoserver/webapps/geoserver/WEB-INF/lib/.
  • After extracting the extension, restart GeoServer in order for the changes to take effect. All further configuration can be done with GeoServer running.

Verifying Installation

On the first startup after installation, GeoServer should create a print module configuration file in {GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR}/printing/config.yaml. Checking for this file's existence is a quick way to verify the module is installed properly. It is safe to edit this file; in fact there is currently no way to modify the print module settings other than by opening this configuration file in a text editor.

If the module is installed and configured properly, then you will also be able to retrieve a list of configured printing parameters from http://localhost:8080/geoserver/pdf/info.json . This service must be working properly for JavaScript clients to use the printing service.

Finally, you can test printing in this sample page <files/print-example.html>. You can load it directly to attempt to produce a map from a GeoServer running at http://localhost:8080/geoserver/. If you are running at a different host and port, you can download the file and modify it with your HTML editor of choice to use the proper URL.

Warning

This sample script points at the development version of GeoExt. You can modify it for production use, but if you are going to do so you should also host your own, minified build of GeoExt and OpenLayers. The libraries used in the sample are subject to change without notice, so pages using them may change behavior without warning.

MapFish documentation