Getting, Building, & Running "OpenMRS"

My goal for this week was to checkout the latest version of OpenMRS and try to build and run it. Conveniently OpenMRS had a great guide for developers looking to build and run the source code here.  I found this guide to be very helpful. OpenMRS recommends that you use a couple of integrated pieces of software in eclipse such as m2eclipse and subclipse. subclipse and m2eclipse proved to be very helpful in the building process. Subclipse, which is a subversion client for eclipse, made it very easy to check out the Trunk for OpenMRS. All you have to do is type the repository's link and designate that it is indeed an SVN server. After checking out the code it was also very simple to build the code using m2eclipse, which is a client that maintains dependencies of a "mavenized" project. At first i encountered an issue with version conflicts but that was easily resolved. After resolving these issues i was able to succesfully build the project. Next my goal was to run the built code. This is the hardest part about the project since it has to be built as a web application instead of a piece of software that you use locally. OpenMRS suggests that you use TomCat to mount the OpenMRS web app. This is what i ran into trouble with. TomCat requires that you change permissions to the "users" file. I ran into trouble getting access to the .xml file. I am very close to getting OpenMRS to run and I am very excited to get it running.


I also got a response from one of the core developers and she suggested that we go ahead and resolve some of the ticket issues/bugs. As soon as i get OpenMRS built i will blog my experiences.