Hi Everyone,
We’re currently preparing for the next set of clinic installations of the OpenMRS PoC in Rwanda for the RHIE,
and given the great progress the team at Regenstrief have made in setting up the sandbox,
I therefore thought that it might an opportune time to bring up the topic of automating the installation processes again.
Of course I know there’s still work left in fully setting up the sandbox,
but what I wanted to do was run our initial process ideas by you guys at Regenstrief,
and then based on your experiences in setting up the two OpenMRS instances, the PoC and the SHR,
see if you had any comments or possible ideas for how we can improve this process.
In addition we can also feedback these install processes and the possible tools we develop for the Rwanda PoCs back into OpenHIE.
So the basic tasks that we need to perform for each clinic (with our tool ideas) are as follows:
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Backup existing data on server
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Upgrade Ubuntu to 12.04 — manual process + puppet for baseline setup
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Install old clinic DB and upgrade OpenMRS to version from 1.6 to 1.9 — manual process
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Install RHIE modules — puppet
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Setup RHIE/MoH OpenMRS config — scripts / OpenMRS module that sets up config
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Run validation tests — manual + tools (possible ideas: selenium / “tester” modules for OpenMRS)
Steps 1-4 are mostly standard stuff. Step 3 can be automated,
but a manual process mean someone can keep an eye on it, since it’s such a critical step.
But automating this and the other manual process would also be good.
Puppet might be a good choice to “glue” all of the steps together in this case.
Step 5 is where we setup the config for OpenMRS, encounter types, HIM settings, etc.
This step is probably the trickiest and can be the most time consuming and error prone, as I’m sure you guys have seen now.
This is the step that we want on our side to try and automate as much as possible for Rwanda.
Our current best idea is maybe to try and write an OpenMRS module that can automate the config setup,
since it might be better to go through the API rather than using SQL scripts or something similar.
Apologies for the lengthy email! But at the end the day I think it would be great just to keep a dialogue going
between our current Rwanda work and the Sandbox work;
and maybe one day we can get to that magic “1-click installer” 
Thanks & Kind Regards
Hannes
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Hannes Venter
Software Developer, Jembi Health Systems | SOUTH AFRICA
Mobile: +27 73 276 2848 | Office: +27 21 701 0939 | Skype: venter.johannes
E-mail: hannes@jembi.org