Finding closest outside point to point inside polygon in PostGIS?

Question

There is the famous ST_ClosestPoint() return the closest point inside polygon to some outside point.

I'm looking the inverse problem: I have a location inside polygon, and I want to get the closest location outside the polygon.

I started thinking that first step should be to find the closest point on the boundary of the polygon. Although I don't know how to achieve this, I'm not sure how to continue even from this stage (considering I have the closest boundary point to my inside point).

EDIT: What about comparing results from ST_Line_Locate_Point() running on all lines of the polygon and choosing the minimum: This gives me the closest point on the border line

WITH border_closest_points AS (
        SELECT ST_Line_Locate_Point(border_lines.geom, ST_GeomFromText('POINT(lon lat)', 4326)) AS fraction,  
        ST_Line_Interpolate_Point(border_lines.geom, ST_Line_Locate_Point(border_lines.geom, ST_GeomFromText('POINT(lon lat)', 4326))) AS closest_point_on_line
        FROM border_lines   
)
SELECT border_closest_points.closest_point_on_line AS geom, ST_Distance(ST_GeomFromText('POINT(lon lat)', 4326), border_closest_points.closest_point_on_line) AS distance
FROM border_closest_points
ORDER BY distance ASC LIMIT 1;

Answer 1

You can dump the border of polygon with ST_ExteriorRing, then it will find the closest point on the resulting linestring, if you want a point that lies just a little bit outside use ST_Buffer first to add a little bit to the original polygon.

 WITH polygons AS(
    SELECT ST_Buffer(ST_GeomFromText('POINT(0 0)', 4326),2) as geom-- this circle will pretend to be a border polygon
 )
 SELECT 
 ST_AsTEXT(ST_ClosestPoint(ST_ExteriorRing(ST_Buffer(polygons.geom,0.0000000001))
        ,ST_GeomFromText('POINT(1 0)', 4326)))
FROM polygons;