Installing on Linux

Installing the packages on Linux distributions is pretty straightforward. The dependencies are installed with the packages, when there are any. We only have to watch out for three things prior to installing the packages. First of all, the package name of the Apache web server can vary between different distributions. On distros using RPM packages (for example--Fedora, CentOS, and openSUSE), it is called httpd, while on the ones using DEB packages (for example--Debian and Ubuntu), it is called apache2. On Arch Linux, it is simply called apache.

The second consideration is related to distributions which do not update their packages frequently, like Debian. GeoServer has a hard dependency of a specific JRE (Java Runtime Environment). We must make sure we have it installed and configured as the default. We will walk through the Debian JRE installation process as it is the most popular Linux distribution with late official package updates. Debian Jessie, the latest stable release of the OS when writing these lines, is packed with OpenJDK 7, while GeoServer 2.11 requires JRE 8:

1. To install OpenJDK 8, we have to enable the Backports repository according to the official Debian guide at https://wiki.debian.org/Backports.
2. If the repository is added, we can reload the packages and install the package openjdk-8-jre.
3. The next step is to make this JRE the default one. We can do this by opening a terminal and typing the following command:

      update-alternatives --config java

1. The next step is self-explanatory; we have to choose the new default environment by typing its ID and pressing enter.

The last consideration before installing the packages is related to the actual version of QGIS. Most of the distributions offer the latest version in a decent time after release; however, some of them like Debian do not. For those distros, we can use QGIS's repository following the official guide at http://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/alldownloads.html.

After all things are set, we can proceed and install the required packages. The order should not matter. If done, let's take a look at GeoServer, which doesn't offer Linux packages to install. It offers two methods for Linux: a WAR for already installed Java servlets (such as Apache Tomcat), and a self-containing platform independent binary. We will use the latter as it's easier to set up:

1. Download GeoServer's platform independent binary from http://geoserver.org/release/stable/.

1. Extract the downloaded archive. It can be anywhere as long as we have a write permission to the destination.
2. Start GeoServer with its startup script. To do this, we navigate into the extracted archive from a terminal and run startup.sh in its bin folder with the following command:

      cd <geoserver's folder>/bin
      ./startup.sh

1. Optionally, we can detach GeoServer from the shell used by the terminal with the startup command nohup ./startup.sh > /dev/null &. This way, we can close the terminal. If we would like to shut down GeoServer manually, we can do so by running its shutdown.sh script.