Let me collect everything I’ve learned deploying Reference Application as docker. Not sure how much it can be applied to other distros.
The OpenMRS SDK has a build-distro goal, and it’s awesome 
It should work with any distro that uses a openmrs-distro.properties file:
mvn openmrs-sdk:build-distro -Ddistro=/path/to/openmrs-distro.properties
You have a lot of different options, including if the distributions plugins will be bundled. The maven goal will not only generate files to build the docker image, but also docker-compose files.
In the reference application maven lifecycle, we have that plugin as part of the default maven lifecycle.
In CI, after the mvn deploy, we build the docker image and push to dockerhub as ‘nightly’ tag.
Build config
docker login -u <username> -p <password>
cd docker
docker build -t openmrs/openmrs-reference-application-distro:nightly .
docker push openmrs/openmrs-reference-application-distro:nightly
docker image inspect --format='{{index .RepoDigests 0}}' openmrs/openmrs-reference-application-distro:nightly > docker-image.txt
The last line will store the ID of the image in a file, so later on the pipeline we can deploy the same image with other tags.
We have a different docker tag per environment/server we have, so the version on each one is updated independently.
We are not using the docker-compose files generated by the SDK. Instead, I do have them in an ansible role. We create volumes for /usr/local/tomcat/.OpenMRS/ and database data. The docker compose should expose only openmrs port on the host, and the README file has more information.
To update the servers after a deployment, there are two ways:
I’m using nginx in front of docker:
Nginx vhost config
server {
listen 80;
server_name msf.openmrs.org;
index index.html index.htm;
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}
server {
listen 443 ssl;
server_name msf.openmrs.org;
index index.html index.htm;
access_log /var/log/nginx/msf_access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/msf_error.log;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/<key>.openmrs.org/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/<key>.openmrs.org/privkey.pem;
location ^~ /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
}
location / {
return 301 https://msf.openmrs.org/openmrs;
}
location /openmrs {
proxy_set_header HOST $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080/openmrs;
}
}
The acme part relates to letsencrypt certificate.
The two set_headers redirect the original host used to reach nginx and the original scheme.
We are deploying all that using ansible.
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