A simple seeding mechanism is included with GeoWebCache 0.6 - 0.8 .

NOTE: This documment does not apply to 1.0-alpha0 and greater!

Access restrictions (introduced in version 0.8)

Seeding can be very computationally intensive for the backend server. Therefore access is restricted to the IP addresses listed in geowebcache-servlet.xml, which by default is localhost (127.0.0.1):

<list>
  <value>127.0.0.1</value>
  <value>a.b.c.d</value>      
</list>

Where a.b.c.d is your ip address. You you have to restart the servlet for changes to take effect.

Update: In 0.8.2 you can specify * , either in geowebcache-servlet.xml, instead of an ip address, or by setting the environment variable GEOWEBCACHE_ALLOWED_SEEDERS. There is a commented out example in web.xml. Note that if you do enable this feature then anyone can seed or truncate your cache! In the future we hope to provide improved granularity.

Seed example

A simple example of how to use the mechanism: http://localhost:8080/geowebcache/seed?layers=topp:states&start=4&stop=12

This will seed the cache for the layer "topp:states" from zoom level 4 to 12 inclusive. The zoomlevels are defined according to the WMS Tiling recommendations, i.e. level 1 shows the world in two tiles, level two in 8 tiles and so forth.

There are three important, but optional, parameters that have been omitted in the request above, their default values are as follows:

• srs: <default from layer>
• format: image/png
• bbox: <bounds of layer, for given srs>

Note that the seeding mechanism will take metatiling into account, and adjust the given bounding box to the nearest complete metatile. Also note that GeoServer currently has issues drawing across the dateline, which you may touch upon when using metatiles.

Truncate example

A simple example of how to use the mechanism: http://localhost:8080/geowebcache/truncate?layers=topp:states

This will truncate the cache for the layer "topp-states".