Sunday, August 19, 2007

Installer Progress Report

Hello. Tonight I'm uploading a slight update to the naive installer. My mentors and I are still working on the issue with the runtime properties environment variable, and in parallel with that I've continued to make progress with merging the naive installer with the smart installer.

In my latest testing involving the environment variable issue, I've discovered the following things:

  • Despite what some websites say online, all changes to environment variables made by BitRock (whether newly created variables or changes to established variables) are immediately reflected without a reboot.
  • Tomcat does not seem to be able to access any new environment variables until after a reboot, despite Windows having refreshed them. The variables are being created/edited prior to anything else in the installer in terms of Tomcat, so that isn't the issue. Moreover, testing the existence of the environment variable in question AFTER the installation has completed and then restarting Tomcat yields the same result of failure to locate the variable.
Changelog

  • Cleans up the post-install script to do away with some unnecessary variables that were being passed in. I had since changed the way those variables were used such that all work was done for them within BitRock instead of the post-install script.
  • Addressed an issue in which I was incorrectly renaming the WAR file to take on the name specified for the webapp. There was apparently some miscommunication here when this was done, but no worries it's fixed now.
  • Added a rename action within BitRock to place the WAR file into the webapps directory. We now no longer need to delete the WAR file in the post-install script
  • I've added a "Reboot Required" screen into BitRock to account for the environment variable issue with Tomcat. This is hopefully only a temporary fix as we'd like to not require a reboot.
Issues
  • Currently, you will have to reboot in order for the install to work.
  • The post-install script is still going to try and launch the web browser to the OpenMRS webapp. I left this in for testing purposes so that you can see right away if Tomcat installed properly. If you see a Tomcat error message, then Tomcat installed fine. If you get a failed connection error from your browser, Tomcat didn't get installed/started: Let me know.

That should be it, let me know how it goes for you though. There will probably be a number of updates this week as we're getting into crunch time, so stay tuned, but keep the feedback coming!

http://openmrs.org/wiki/Special:Downloads/Releases/OpenMRS_Installer/OpenMRS-Installer-1.1.0-5.exe

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