dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there,
Knut, Bob, Lars and myself have been having a bit of a discussion on
the side regarding an installer. I had an urgent need to have
something yesterday, so I have taken the initiative to create yet
another installer. I am aware of other versions out there, but perhaps
a fresh start is not such a bad idea. With Bobs help with the DHIS2
live package, I have created a first version of an installer (only
tested on Windows XP), and have placed it here

bzr branch lp:~jason-p-pickering/+junk/dhis2-live-installer

This is basically an IZPack installer configuration file. There are
two files that are important. The install.xml file and the
shortcutSpec.xml.

Basically, for my case,I needed DHIS2 to appear as a "real"
application, with shortcuts, uninstaller, etc, and to be populated
with our data.

So, the basic procedure is as follows (modified from Bobs mail)

Unzip the dhis.war file into the /webapps/dhis directory. In my case,
we are using BIRT, so I do the same for that.
The other configuration files,I left as is for the time being. I
placed the docs from the documentation branch into the /docs directory

In my case, I got a dhis2-live.exe file from Bob (not really sure how
this is generated but anyway...Bob can fill in the details) and placed
the  dhis2-live-jar-with-dependencies.jar (renaming it to
dhis2-live.jar) in the root directory of the installer.

After that, I just  compiled with the Izpack compile.bat file,
something like this...

C:\dhis2-live-shell>"c:\Program Files\IzPack\bin\compile.bat" install.xml -b . -
o dhis2-installer.jar

Now, I just execute the dhis2-installer.jar, and everything works,
with shortcuts and an uninstaller. Sweet, just what the boss wanted.

I went for IZPack because it seems pretty simple, and also seems to be
able to be integrated with maven.
The description for maven integration is here

http://izpack.codehaus.org/izpack-maven-plugin/

It would be ideal to be able to populate the /webapps/dhis directory
during the build process, and the
/docs/ directory with a fresh build of the docs from the documentation branch.

So, as we make changes to the application/docs/installer everything is
kept fresh and up to date.

Another consideration is how and if to install Postgres or MySQL. I
have not dealt with this yet, but it would seem to be feasible.

This installer will likely require modification by individual
implementers, but this provides at least a bare-bones installer
(albeit, perhaps yet another duplication). Anyway, it is on launchpad,
so perhaps it will be useful for others.

Feedback welcome.

Best regards,
Jason