Vjylku

I want to run GeoServer 2.14 with Jetty on a Ubuntu 18.04.
I copied the war-file in the webapps folder and GeoServer is responding.

Unfortunately I can not set the data directory location as described in the GeoServer docs.

I appended the following line to /etc/environment:

GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR="/opt/geoserver_data"

After logging in to the system the variable is set as expected:

#echo $GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR

/opt/geoserver_data

I also created the folder /opt/geoserver_data:

#ls -la /opt/geoserver_data

total 8

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 12 15:20 .

drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Nov 12 15:20 ..

When I restart Jetty, the first two GeoServer log lines are:

INFO [geoserver.platform] - Falling back to embedded data directory: /tmp/jetty-0.0.0.0-8080-geoserver.war-_geoserver-any-6077051313967886521.dir/webapp/data

INFO [geoserver.platform] - Falling back to embedded data directory: /tmp/jetty-0.0.0.0-8080-geoserver.war-_geoserver-any-6077051313967886521.dir/webapp/data

This is strange because according to the GeoServer source code, there should be a warning that the given folder does not exist or is not writable.

Obviously I am doing something wrong, but I have no idea what?

Update:

Based on Ian Turton's answer, I ensured that jetty is not run as root.
Furthermore I start jetty now with -DGEOSERVER_DATA_DIR=/opt/geoserver_data, which is easier to handle than a system variable.

At the moment I still get the following warning messages:

WARN [geoserver.platform] - Found Java environment variable GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR set to /opt/geoserver_data , which is not writeable

INFO [geoserver.platform] - Falling back to embedded data directory: /tmp/jetty-0.0.0.0-8080-geoserver.war-_geoserver-any-1540535100624462590.dir/webapp/data

But at least the expected warning is shown. Although the fallback data directory still looks odd.

The most likely issue is that the user running jetty doesn't have write/execute permission to /opt/geoserver_data. If you are running jetty as root then please don't!

Next, most likely is that the user running jetty doesn't run a shell that sources /etc/environment as part of its start up.

Finally, your fallback jetty data directory looks odd, /tmp/jetty-0.0.0.0-8080-geoserver.war-_geoserver-any-6077051313967886521.dir/webapp/data looks like you have not unpacked the platform independent binary properly. I would expect to see something like /tmp/geoserver-2.14.0/data_dir if you had unpacked it in /tmp.

I found that a recent update to jetty9 in Ubuntu has added the entries

ProtectSystem=strict
ReadWritePaths=/var/lib/jetty9/

to

/lib/systemd/system/jetty9.service

which then prevents GeoServer from using an external data directory.