Installing Geoserver (Binary) in windows

Krishna G. Lodha
SpatialOps
Published in
4 min readOct 5, 2020

I was recently trying to install geoserver 2.17.0 on a windows machine, until now I was using version 2.15, which had a Windows Installer provided directly , so it was pretty straight forward, but when I switched to 2.17. BAM!! No more easy was of downloading Installer and following series of ‘Next’ buttons. As any sane developer, I turned towards Official docs on how to install Binary. But It was pretty confusing at this part

Setting Environment Variables for geoserver

Here is how you can do it:

Step 1 : Download JAVA JRE 8

Note that Geoserver works only on JRE 8 so if you have JRE 9, please uninstall it and download JRE 8 from here. Depending upon your system download x64 or x32 bit version. On downloading you can install it like any other usual software. Please pay attention to the folder in which you are installing (e.g. C:/Program Files/) . Once you do that you need to add it in Environment variables as well which we’ll do afterwards

Step 2: Download Geoserver

As mentioned earlier, from version 2.16 and above( It works exactly same for any version) , there is no executable file, hence we’ll use Platform independent Binary.

Head over to http://geoserver.org/release/stable/ and click on platform independent Binary

Geoserver Download Page
Downloaded zip

once the .zip is downloaded, unzip it in the same folder where use JAVA folder lives (C:/ Program files/)

unzipping geoserver in the same directory where JAVA folder is

Step 3: Setting up environment Variables

We’ll setup 3 Variables in order to run geoserver successfully. Search for environment variables in search menu and open window. Inside Advance tab Click on Environment variables button to Open another window.

Environment variable window

Under System Variables add 3 new variables as follows :
Copy the Variable name as it is and in Variable Value use Browse Directory button to target to given folder

JAVA HOME
Geoserver Home
Geoserver data directory

Step 4: Setting up CORS Policy

Finally !! We have installed geoserver , now before running let’s setup CORS policy so we can access all data via geoserver without any error

Go to Following path : \geoserver\webapps\geoserver\WEB-INF\Web.xml and uncomment CORS related code

CORS Related code can be found by searching CORS in web.xml file

Step 5: Running Geoserver

Once all the steps are completed, you can head over to geoserver/bin and double click on startup batch file to run the geoserver

Startup file location
Geoserver started successfully

Geoserver Interface

Geoserver can be accessed via http://localhost:8080/geoserver/web/ with following user cred Username : admin and Password : geoserver

Geoserver Homepage

Video version of this blog can be found here

About me

Hi, I’m Krishna Lodha, I’m a full stack Web GIS developer. I’m really enthusiastic about the power of locations and what story it tells us. Read more about me at http://krishnaglodha.com , to get more information about this code or suggest a better way to do it. ping me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/krishnaglodha/

Adios!

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