Installing Apache Server and HealthShare HealthConnect on Ubuntu Linux

You may have already heard that, starting with IRIS and HealthShare HealthConnect 2023.2 versions, the internal Apache Server will be removed from the default installation, so it will be necessary to have an external application server such as Apache Server or NGINX.

In this article I am going to proceed to install a HealthShare HealthConnect 2023.1 so that it works with a pre-installed Apache Server. For this I will use a virtual machine on which I have installed an Ubuntu 22.04.

Installing Apache Server

As we have indicated, we must previously install our Apache Server and we will do so following the steps indicated by its own web

sudo apt update
sudo apt install apache2

Apache Server installed, let's proceed with installing HealthConnect.

Installing HealthConnect

Let's review what the official InterSystems documentation tells us. If you consult the documentation, it tells us how to unzip the file that we have downloaded from WRC. In my case I will have to do a few tweaks since I have the HealthConnect source in a shared folder with my virtual machine.

mkdir /tmp/iriskit 
chmod og+rx /tmp/iriskit 
umask 022 
gunzip -c /mnt/hgfs/shared/HealthConnect-2023.1.0.229.0-lnxubuntu2204x64.tar.gz | ( cd /tmp/iriskit ; tar xf - )

Let's review what we're doing with these commands.

1. We create the directory where we are going to unzip our HealthConnect source.
2. We give read and execute permissions of the created directory both to the owner of the file and to all the users of the owner's group to be able to unzip the file in the indicated directory.
3. We give read, write and execute permissions on all the files and directories that are going to be created.
4. We decompress the gz file and accessing the path where we have decompressed it, after that we decompress the tar file.

Let's see our temporary directory.

Perfect, here we have the code for our HealthShare HealthConnect. Next step, create a user that will be the owner of the HealthConnect installation, we will call it irisusr and then from our temporary directory we will execute the installation command:

sudo useradd irisusr
sudo sh irisinstall

When executing the installation, we will be shown a series of options that we will have to configure with the values we want. In this case we are going to carry out a CUSTOM installation to be able to configure the WebGateway with the Apache web server.

And we continue...

At this point we must indicate that we want to configure the Web Gateway with the Apache Web Server already deployed in our server and continue to define its installation path.

Apache Server configuration

The installation will automatically configure the Web Gateway to work with the Apache Server and our APACHETEST instance of HealthConnect. In this example, being Ubuntu 22.0.4, the Apache configuration file is found in the path /etc/apache2/apache2.conf , for other Linux distributions you can consult the documentation.

If we open the apache2.conf file and scroll down to the end of it we can check the changes introduced by the Web Gateway installation:

This configuration is redirecting all calls received by port 80 (the port Apache Server listens on by default) with the /csp route to our Web Gateway, which in turn will send the call to our HealthConnect instance. By default, the CSPFileTypes parameter is configured only to redirect "csp cls zen cxw" type files, in order to work with the management portal without any problem we have modified it to accept all "*" types. Changing the CSPFileTypes requires a restart of Apache Server.

Accessing to Management Portal

Alright, we have our Apache listening on port 80, our Web Gateway configured, and the HealthConnect instance started. Let's test access to the management portal using Apache port 80.

In my case, the access URL will be http://192.168.31.214/csp/sys/%25CSP.Portal.Home.zen, since port 80 is the default port, it will not be necessary to include it in the URL.

Here we have our fully operational management portal. Let's enter the username and password that we defined during the installation and open the Web Gateway configuration from the option System Administrator --> Configuration --> Web Gateway Management. For this screen the access user will be CSPSystem. Remember that the Web Gateway is configured to work with the Apache Web Server that we have previously installed.

Let's access the Server Access option to check the configuration of our HealthConnect instance in the Web Gateway:

There we have our instance. Let's check how the Web Gateway manages the calls received from the Apache Server by opening the Application Access option.

Let's see what it does with URLs starting with /csp

There is our instance configured by default to receive the calls that arrive to our Apache Server.

Finally we have our instance of HealthShare HealthConnect configured to work with an external Apache Server and the Web Gateway. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to send us a comment.