I’m excited to announce the next major 3.3.0 release of OpenMRS SDK!
In this release we added full docker support for distributions.
You can now call openmrs-sdk:build-distro to create docker files for your distribution. The goal will download all modules and war file and put it inside a docker image. It will also create a docker-compose file to run mysql, mysql volume and openmrs container for you! After calling build-distro you are just a command away from running your distro in a production environment with ‘docker-compose up’.
We have used default settings for Tomcat and MySQL, but we are sure they can be tweaked to work faster with OpenMRS. We welcome any suggestions from people running OpenMRS in production.
@raff and @gutkowski Thanks for the excellent work, SDK makes OpenMRS development a pleasurable experience.
One interesting challenge we have is with deployment to a production server. Currently we have a separate distro-platform project that we use to build a WAR file containing all bundled modules what we push to a server. Is it possible to add a task to the SDK that can build a WAR file like this which removes the need for the distro-platform project (maybe the core OpenMRS can also use this when releasing).
@ssmusoke, I’d advise you to move on to Docker deployments. It’s extremely easy with the new goal openmrs-sdk:build-distro. It bundles all modules and war in a single image. I hope @gutkowski will document how to use it soon.
We could add a task to build just a war with modules, but I really think production deployments should be done with Docker these days. At some point we will improve Docker configs to easily scale up with multiple instances of OpenMRS and DBs. You will be able to benefit from such improvements going the Docker path.
Also you will benefit from any tweaks to Tomcat and MySQL we will make in the future to speed up OpenMRS.
@raff In Uganda our production environments are physical sites distributed across the country not connected to the Internet, so we do not have Docker running on those sites. The WAR file would provide an upgrade that would be manually delivered.
The built WAR file would also be added to an installer (Windows or Linux). Hence the reason for maintaining the distribution platform.
@ssmusoke, Docker lets you store images in a file and move them around offline. You could exercise the following:
mvn openmrs-sdk:build-distro -Ddistro=referenceapplication:2.5-SNAPSHOT -Ddir=docker
cd docker
docker build -t openmrs-distro-referenceapplication:2.5-SNAPSHOT .
docker save -o openmrs-distro-referenceapplication-2.5-SNAPSHOT.tar openmrs-distro-referenceapplication:2.5-SNAPSHOT
docker save -o mysql-5.6.tar mysql:5.6
and then transfer the .tar files together with the docker-compose.yml file to another machine and run:
docker load -i mysql-5.6.tar
docker load -i openmrs-distro-referenceapplication-2.5-SNAPSHOT.tar
docker-compose up
It requires some changes in the way you deliver software, but I do believe it is superior than delivering just a war file and having to make sure that Java, Tomcat and MySQL are installed and configured separately.
The drawback is that those 2 docker files have almost 800 MBs, but we’ll cut that number down in some future release. Of course you do not have to load mysql-5.6.tar with your next update, which alone cuts the size by ~320 MBs.
That said, you can always request a feature you need (building the war with bundled modules for distro) by creating an issue in JIRA
We are currently looking at the right way to automate the configuration and deployment of our OpenMRS production servers.
I have a few questions about this new feature:
Each of our client uses his own set of module, so I would like to make sure that the SDK builds the right distro.
Is it possible to build the docker image with my own distro (war + omods - distributed on Bintray for instance)?
Then, once my prod server is online, can this be used to deploy a module upgrade. Should I rebuild a new Docker image?
I would version such a file in git repo and then have a CI plan, which clones the repo and calls
mvn openmrs-sdk:build-distro
docker build
and then pushes an image to docker registry like Bintray or Docker Hub.
Next you can configure your servers to simply pull images from docker registry and run containers. They can be configured to pull updated images automatically or on request and restart containers.
If there’s a module update you set the version in openmrs-distro.properties, build and push a new image to docker registry through the CI plan and then your server can pull it.
Currently, we are hosting specific versions of pre-compiled modules (war + omods) in a binaries repository. Each client has his own repo of binaries.
We do this because we use forked version of official modules and some of our own modules too. For instance one client uses our Visit Documents UI module which is not available on the OpenMRS repo.
Is there a way with the SDK to pull custom modules, based on a provided URL, and build the Docker image ?
@mksrom, do you store binaries in a maven repository? If yes, then you just have to update your maven settings.xml file to point to that repository and SDK will pull from there. If not, I’d recommend you to consider storing them that way.
Currently there’s no support for other repositories than maven.
@raff just bringing this back up on your radar, any chance of being able to build a WAR file with modules defined in a distro.properties file as this will save the use of and maintenance of distro-platform projects
@tmarzeion Thanks for this tested out the feature. When I run the following command mvn openmrs-sdk:build-distro -Dbundled=true -Ddir=aijar -Ddistro=org.openmrs.module:aijar:1.0.15-SNAPSHOT
I see the following:
A folder called AIJAR is created
The WAR file is included along with docker image information
