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geospatialcesiumjsterriajs

How to deploy TerriaJS on my site

I would like to deploy an instance of TerriaJS on my site for the purpose of 3D (with 2D-fallback) geospatial mapping. I am a bit confused as to how to actually "deploy" TerriaJS on my site. I am very familiar with Leaflet... pretty much just include the leaflet.js file, create a div, and off you go. However, I am running through the wiki on TerriaJS's github page and all I see is a bunch of NodeJS.

What am I missing? I am able to get the map to run with NPM and I see a nice 3D map (running inside of a node web server instance), but that doesn't do me any good as I want to be able to embed the map on my web site.

If anyone has a nice (plain English) tutorial or starting point, that would be awesome.

Thanks.

Solution

  • The Node-based web server that we usually use with TerriaJS only does a few things:

    • It serves up the static HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that make up the application.
    • It includes a simple service at /proxy that allows TerriaJS to access geospatial data servers that don't support CORS.
    • It includes another service at /convert that uses OGR to transform geospatial vector data (e.g. shapefiles) to GeoJSON for display by the TerriaJS client.

    Of these, only the first is required. So, you can copy the wwwroot directory of a working TerriaJS application up to whatever web server runs your site and it will run there just as well as it does on the Node-based server. You'll have to make sure that all of your geospatial data is either on the same server or is hosted on servers that support CORS, and shapefile conversion won't be supported, but other than that you should be good to go.

    Embedding TerriaJS in an existing web page is a bit trickier. You'll want to start with the index.js, index.html, and index.less files in the TerriaJS app you started with (NationalMap maybe?) and modify them to suite your needs. You'll need to use the gulp-based build process. But once that is all done, you can just copy the files up to your web server as before.

    Depending on your needs, you may also consider embedding TerriaJS on your page in an iframe rather than building it into the page directly. You can control the content of the catalog and customize some basic aspects of the UI by specifying parameters to the URL. You can also control it by posting cross-window messages as described here.

    Finally, it's possible to use TerriaJS without the provided user interface, e.g. by providing your own. This is a pretty advanced scenario, though, so probably best to post a separate question if you want to go down that road.