Debugging GeoServer

Resources:

This section does not attempt to cover developer-level debugging in GeoServer as this is a much larger topic involving many more tools. The goal here is to provide ‘black-box’ techniques to help resolve and report problems.

Logging

GeoServer logging, while sometimes containing too much information, is the best way to start diagnosing an issue in GeoNode once the other. To create a proper error report for use in requesting support, providing any contextual logging information is critical.

When using a standard GeoServer installation, the GeoServer logs are located at /usr/share/geoserver/data/logs/geoserver.log. The properties files that control the varying rules are also located here.

Exercises

  1. Switch logging levels for various loggers.
  2. Look at the different logging profiles and discuss the loggers and levels.
  3. Learn how to read stack traces, nested or otherwise.

Advanced Troubleshooting

JVM diagnostics and advanced troubleshooting techniques are covered in the GeoServer documents linked to above. When providing information for a bug report, these can be helpful but in-depth Java knowledge is required to fully comprehend the output from some of these tools.

Exercises

  1. Look at jstack output

Using Django to Help Debug

The gsconfig library provides a rich interface to interacting with GeoServer’s REST API. This allows high-level functions as well as viewing raw REST responses.

cat = Layer.objects.gs_catalog
cat.get_layers() # list of gsconfig layer objects
# OR, for a specific layer
lyr = Layer.objects.get(id=1)
lyr.resource # specific gsconfig layer object
lyr.resource.fetch() # get the XML from REST
lyr.resource.dom # reference to the parsed XML
from xml.etree.ElementTree import tostring
tostring(lyr.resource.dom)