Getting, Building, Running OpenMRS

Our team is making some real progress in our efforts to contribute to OpenMRS.  One of our members has successfully made contact with an OpenMRS representative.  The rep inquired how many people we have to work on the project as well as what our time line is.  The idea being that he/she will be able to point us towards some work depending on these variables.

I have successfully checked out the OpenMRS code, built it, and deployed OpenMRS on my local machine.  Setting up my computer to be ready to develop on OpenMRS involved installing many different things that I had no experience with.  Luckily, the OpenMRS website contains a plethora of great information on getting it up and running.

The instruction guide led me to install a subversion plug-in for Eclipse called Subclipse.  Subclipse made it very easy for me to check out the OpenMRS code straight from Eclipse.  Building the project required the installation of a Maven plug-in for Eclipse called m2eclipse.  After installing the plug-in, I just needed to make a new Maven run configuration for the project with the goal "clean install -DskipTests".


Installing and running the actual OpenMRS web app was rather difficult.  It involved installing and configuring MySQL as well as Tomcat6.  I had never used Tomcat before, so this part of the process was especially difficult.  But through the scientific process of Googling tomcat errors followed by reconfiguring, I was eventually able to get Tomcat up and going and then able to deploy OpenMRS on it.