I am not sure where this will end, however it is my way of giving back to the OpenMRS community that has provided an excellent learning platform and great support to me over the last 6 months, I have been using the software tools.
My intention is to share what I know, as a way of organising my thoughts and sharing ideas as I figure out where to add this to the OpenMRS community documentation, where it surely belongs. The flow of each of these posts will usually be to answer a very specific question that I have asked in the past, and where I think I have figured out an approach that seems to work.
UPDATE December 31, 2015: The new home for this blog post is on the OpenMRS Wiki at https://wiki.openmrs.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=93358939 all further updates will be placed there
Problem Statement: How can I get an OpenMRS distribution that has all the modules that I need?
New to OpenMRS – What is Possible?
If you are new to OpenMRS and would like to see what is possible, then download the OpenMRS X.X Standalone Edition from http://openmrs.org/download/ which contains a pre-configured reference application with sample data that is ready to run in a single command. This is note meant for production use as the embedded components are not robust enough for the growth in data collected.
Enterprise Installation like Reference Application
If the reference application provides all the modules that you need, the next step is to set-up n enterprise ready installation using a dedicated application server & database in which the Platform x.xx WAR (for Enterprise) can be installed. The modules for the reference application above can be downloaded as a zip file from the standalone edition above.
Full Control of Enterprise Installation
The last option is the most complex, and is for those implementors who want to install the enterprise edition but have control over what modules are installed or even what versions. In this case the OpenMRS distro platform is your best choice (https://github.com/openmrs/openmrs-distro-platform) which allows the building of a custom WAR file that includes the modules that you need.
The modules are defined in the pom.xml file and are accessed from the OpenMRS Maven Nexus repository (http://mavenrepo.openmrs.org/nexus/index.html#view-repositories;modules~browsestorage).
An addition to this project is for modules (pending review) but currently available at https://github.com/ssmusoke/openmrs-distro-platform is the ability to include custom modules (*.omod files) by dropping them in a folder called modules.
Please do share your comments on this style and let me know where it would fit best in the OpenMRS community documentation
