Getting, Building, & Running "OpenMRS" Part 2

Okay!

Finally managed to deploy OpenMRS locally after a whole flurry of issues. Thank God for Google!

I first had issues with installing the right packages that were needed to install and run OpenMRS. Tomcat6 is used to deploy OpenMRS on a local server. Unfortunately it's not easy to get Tomcat6 working. The Tomcat6 download in the Ubuntu repositories is not a good install and has missing files, in my experience, that are crucial to running Tomcat6. I had to go directly to the apache Tomcat6 website and get a mirror to download the tar.gz file from their repositories. Some of my best researched advice came from "how to geek".

This was easy since all i did was run:

sudo wget http://www.trieuvan.com/apache/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.32/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.32.tar.gz

sudo tar xvzf  apache-tomcat-6.0.32.tar.gz

sudo mv apache-tomcat-6.0.32.tar.gz usr/share/tomcat6

After installing Tomcat6 properly I had to change a couple .xml files associated with the software in order to get it running. This was fairly simple.

Next was the feat of trying to get OpenMRS deployed on the tomcat server. This took me multiple tries with different settings. The quick installation is known to fail since it was just commited to the OpenMRS Trunk last week. All I had to do was to try and run the advanced install and I finally have OpenMRS running.

I can now start to explore some of OpenMRS and find out how i can contribute to the bug fixes located in their ticket system, implemented with JIRA. I look forward to blogging about more of my experiences.


Here's a screenshot of OpenMRS finally deployed on my system:

OpenMRS FINALLY Deployed

A word of advice for those reading that are trying to Build-->Install-->Deploy OpenMRS on Ubuntu:
Make sure that you get a good Tomcat6 install with /conf directory and make sure you use sun-java-6-sdk. This is crucial to getting OpenMRS deployed correctly.