Deployment

Start Finch PyWPS service

After successful installation, you can start the service using the finch command-line:

$ finch --help  # show help
$ finch start  # start service with default configuration

OR

$ finch start --daemon  # start service as daemon
loading configuration
forked process id: 42

The deployed WPS service is available by default on port 5000:

http://localhost:5000/wps?service=WPS&version=1.0.0&request=GetCapabilities.

Once the service is running, a pywps.pid file is created in the current directory. This file contains the process ID of the running finch service.

Alternatively, you can find which process uses a given port using the following command (here for port 5000):

$ netstat -nlp | grep :5000

Check the log files for errors:

$ tail -f  pywps.log

Stopping the finch daemon:

$ finch stop

Changing the default port

You can overwrite the default PyWPS configuration by using command-line options. See the Finch help for which options are available:

$ finch start --help
--hostname HOSTNAME        hostname in PyWPS configuration.
--port PORT                port in PyWPS configuration.

Start service with different hostname and port

$ finch start --hostname localhost --port 5001

Starting Finch WPS the lazy way (from sources)

If finch is running from a clone of the GitHub source code repository, you can alternatively simply use the Makefile to start and stop the service:

$ make start
$ make status
$ tail -f pywps.log
$ make stop

If you wish to always run Finch from the Makefile, you can set the URL and port via environment variables:

$ export WPS_URL=http://localhost:9876  # to set a particular URL:port

Deploying Finch from a Docker container

Running Finch as a Docker service is very simple:

$ docker run -p 5000:5000 birdhouse/finch

This will start Finch mapped to port 5000, allowing you to access Finch at http://localhost:5000.

Using Ansible to deploy Finch WPS

Ansible can also be used to deploy finch on your system. See the Ansible playbook example for more information.