Installing GeoServer

We are well on our way! Go to the GeoServer download page as shown in the following screenshot (http://geoserver.org/download/) and review the installation options available. You will find some different packages for GeoServer. We will use the Web Archive version:

You may select a release from two different branches--Stable and Maintenance. Both of them are built for production purposes, so you can choose whatever you prefer; also, we suggest you select the latest release as it contains all the new features the developer team has just released.

Apart from the Production tab, you may have noted there are two other sections--Development and Archived. Inside the Development section, you will find a nightly build, these releases are not suitable for production as they may be prone to bugs, but it contains all the changes the developers did on the source code, so you can use it to test the fix of a bug you discovered:

Archived contains older releases. These may be useful if you are using an old release of GeoServer and need to upgrade it to a newer one, but you don't want to jump to the last one. Another use case may be if you are deploying GeoServer in an environment where an old JRE version, 7.x or 6.x, is available and you cannot upgrade it.

In the following section, we will deploy the web archive on Apache Tomcat. As you may have guessed, using a Java application server is pretty much the same on any operating system. The next section is common to Linux and Windows, as using Tomcat requires the same steps on both operating systems. As long as you are using GeoServer deployed on Tomcat you will have no difference with examples described in this book, whatever operating system you are using.