Installer Beta

Greetings! I put in a 10 hour work day today, and I've got a beta-installer working. It does essentially what the current izpack installer does (although the version a lot of you/us were trying to use was broke, you may not have seen it). As I said before I've been focused on handling dependencies or I would have had this beta out a lot sooner. A couple of notes on the beta:

1. It's a beta. I don't recommend running this on a system with any sort of working OpenMRS installation. The reason is that the installer will drop the 'openmrs' database if it exists. I have done next to nothing with the actual OpenMRS system, so I'm not sure what you all may be doing with it, but you've been warned, 'openmrs' gets dropped and re-created with the demo data contained in the sql scripts on the website. Also, if you have Tomcat running, you MUST stop it prior to running the installer. You can "Cancel" the Tomcat install later, but you must make sure Tomcat isn't running.

2. During the install you will be asked for various pieces of information such as: MySQL Username, MySQL Password, MySQL Port, MySQL database name to use, Tomcat Username, and finally the Tomcat Password. Currently, I don't have silent installs of the dependencies implemented; there are a lot of things to address in that regard and it may not turn out to be possible with the way we are currently doing things. Because of this, you will have to enter this data twice. Once in the BitRock install portion, and then again when BitRock launches the dependency installers. If this data doesn't match, it won't work obviously. If you happen to already have these dependencies installed, be sure to provide BitRock with the usernames/passwords/ports that you are currently using and of course "Cancel" out of the dependency installations when they get launched.

3. More so, if you already have any of the dependency applications installed, feel free to hit "Cancel" when that particular installer gets launched at the end. HOWEVER, if you "Cancel" the MySQL installer, you need to make sure that mysql.exe is in your path.

4. Following with that, if you DON'T hit cancel on the installers, the only one that you need to do anything special for is the MySQL installer. The instructions for that installer are as follows:

• Select "Typical Install"
• Skip Sign-Up
• "Configure Server Now"
• "Standard Configuration"
• "Install As Windows Service" AND "Launch Automatically" AND "Include In Path"
• "Modify" but do not allow remote access

Note: If you choose to uninstall MySQL prior to running this installer, you MUST delete the C:\Program Files\ entry for MySQL. Otherwise, it won't accept the username/password you provide during the MySQL installation. Basically, if you want to let the installer load MySQL, uninstall your copy and delete it's program folder. Then, use BitRock to set a username/password and then give that same data to the MySQL installer that gets launched at the end of the installation process.

5. There will be a slight bit of lag/delay as the installer executes all of the sql scripts and deploys the .war file. This is normal. What you will see is a long pause, then a browser will launch and connect to the OpenMRS installation. Then, a script output box will appear. You can just hit "OK", and then the installation will ask you to view the README, and you'll be done.

6. If you get an "out of sync" error when you try to view the installation, you'll need to restart Tomcat. This probably means you didn't read step #1... but I ran into this when I manually dropped the 'openmrs' database and then ran the installer without ever restarting Tomcat.

The whole process is actually really simple, although it may "sound" complicated. The goal of this beta was to install all OpenMRS and all of its dependencies on a completely bare system. However, in my own testing, I commented out the lines that launched the dependency installers since I already had them, so I know that this method does work as well. However, you just need to be aware of the issues I mentioned above when choosing to forgo the dependency installations in light of using your own.

Your feedback is welcomed, but please keep in mind this is a beta, and a lot of the issues will be fixed in the upcoming days/week. Dependency awareness is the next big step for the installer and that alone will solve 80% of the issues. Thanks!

Download

http://resources.openmrs.org/OpenMRS-Installer-Beta.exe