OpenMRS is an open source medical record system that is designed to manage healthcare information in a comprehensive and easy-to-use manner. It is a powerful tool that can help healthcare providers to improve the quality of care that they deliver to their patients. In this article, we will explain how to install and configure OpenMRS on Debian 10.

First, we need to download the OpenMRS distribution package. We can download it from the official website at https://openmrs.org/download/. The latest version of OpenMRS at the time of writing is 2.3.0. We need to download the distribution package that is appropriate for our system. In this case, we will download the Linux distribution package.

Once the download is complete, we need to extract the package. We can do this by running the following command:

tar xzf openmrs-distro-*.tar.gz

This will extract the contents of the package into a new directory called openmrs-distro-*.

Next, we need to install Java on our system. OpenMRS requires Java 8 or higher in order to run. We can install Java by running the following command:

apt-get install default-jdk

This will install the default Java Development Kit (JDK) on our system.

After Java is installed, we need to create a database for OpenMRS to use. We can use MySQL or MariaDB for this purpose. In this example, we will use MariaDB. To install MariaDB, we can run the following command:

apt-get install mariadb-server

This will install MariaDB on our system. After the installation is complete, we need to create a database and a user for OpenMRS. We can do this by running the following commands:

mysql -u root -p

This will open the MariaDB prompt. At the prompt, we can run the following commands to create a database and a user for OpenMRS:

CREATE DATABASE openmrs;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON openmrs.* TO 'openmrs'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Replace password with a strong password of your choice. This will create a database called openmrs and a user called openmrs with the password that you specified.

Next, we need to install Tomcat. Tomcat is a web server that is required by OpenMRS to run. We can install Tomcat by running the following command:

apt-get install tomcat8

This will install Tomcat on our system.

After Tomcat is installed, we need to create a configuration file for OpenMRS. We can do this by running the following command:

cp openmrs-distro-*/openmrs-runtime.properties /etc/openmrs/

This will copy the configuration file to the /etc/openmrs/ directory.

Next, we need to edit the configuration file to specify the database and user that we created earlier. We can do this by running the following command:

nano /etc/openmrs/openmrs-runtime.properties

This will open the configuration file in the nano text editor, you will need to edit the configuration file to specify the database and user that you created earlier. This can be done by modifying the following lines in the configuration file:

connection.username=openmrs
connection.password=password
connection.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/openmrs?autoReconnect=true

Make sure to replace password with the password that you specified when creating the openmrs user in the database.

After making the necessary changes to the configuration file, we can save and close it.

Next, we need to create a .war file for OpenMRS. This file contains all of the files and resources that are needed to run OpenMRS. We can create the .war file by running the following command:

cd openmrs-distro-*/
ant

This will create a .war file in the openmrs-distro-*/webapp/ directory.

After the .war file is created, we can deploy it to Tomcat by copying it to the webapps directory of Tomcat. This can be done by running the following command:

cp openmrs-distro-*/webapp/openmrs.war /var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/

This will copy the .war file to the webapps directory of Tomcat.

Finally, we need to start Tomcat so that it can deploy the OpenMRS application. We can do this by running the following command:

systemctl start tomcat8

This will start Tomcat and deploy the OpenMRS application.

To access the OpenMRS application, you can open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080/openmrs/. This will open the OpenMRS login page. You can log in using the default username admin and password Admin123.

That’s it! You have successfully installed and configured OpenMRS on Debian 10. You can now use OpenMRS to manage healthcare information and improve the quality of care that you provide to your patients.