Help Wanted: Guidelines for How to Deploy Updates at OpenMRS 3 Sites

A few of us have started working on this draft - some new Implementers pointed out we don’t have any docs with guidance on how to do this!

TBH, I’m not very knowledgeable on the technical process here, so I need your help! Especially from any Implementers willing to share their workflows, experiences, suggestions.

The draft is an open document - if you have anything to add, please add a comment in the document or here in this thread to help out. :folded_hands: :heart:

Thank you so much!!

The scenarios I’m hoping we can address with decent guidelines are things like:

  • Content Updates like Forms, Concepts, and Metadata: E.g. The Ministry calls your team and says they are updating a standard form, and now you need to update that form across all your 100+ sites. Your team updates the form and saves the updated config in GitHub. But then, what do you do next to get that content out to your 100+ sites? Do you deploy to Docker? Make sure there’s a service to pull down updates at sites?
  • Locally Hosted Sites: E.g. You have many locations across a country, and new departments need to be added to a locally-hosted site. How do you roll out configuration updates like this to locally-hosted deployments?
  • Low or No IT Support at Sites: E.g. Many sites using OpenMRS have little or no IT-type help on site. Some sites have no “computer experts” at all. Sending technical team members to travel to sites is usually expensive (cost for stipends, fuel, time away from other work), and in some cases impossible (e.g. disasters, conflict zones). Most Implementers cannot send staff to sites in person only to do upgrades and reboots. This means update workflows have to be very simple for non-technical staff to be able to deploy at their site with minimal assistance.

CC @slubwama @mmwanje @moshon @aojwang @ball @mseaton @frederic.deniger and please CC anyone else I may have missed (it’s late/bedtime for me now so apologies for all I’ve missed) who would be a great knowledge source for deployment guidance :slight_smile:

3 Likes