Welcome to the next chapter of my CI/CD series, where we discuss possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab.

Today I want to share a few approaches that will decrease your compilation time (especially if you're doing incremental/diff compilation rather than a full build).

Compiler flags and qualifiers

Code load and compilation are affected by a variety of flags and qualifiers. If you write deployment scripts for InterSystems platforms, I highly recommend reading them at least once through.

We are a group of interface analysts in a healthcare setting, running IRIS for Health 2024, having upgraded over time from an old ENSEMBLE environment.  We have been working on a wish list of development goals, but are having trouble finding the correct, best practice method/path for getting to what we envision.

Current state:  We run IRIS for Health on a Redhat 8 virtual machine.  We run Interoperability productions (IE.cls) out of 6 namespaces.  We have a dev/test box and a production box.

The 2025.3 release of InterSystems IRIS® data platform, InterSystems IRIS^® for Health, and HealthShare^® Health Connect is now Generally Available (GA). This is a Continuous Delivery (CD) release.

Release Highlights:

• Secure Wallet: A new encrypted framework for managing sensitive data, built on the IRISSECURITY database, improving system security and access control.
• Expanded Observability & Cloud Integrations: Enhanced OpenTelemetry metrics, including new process and ECP metrics, plus journal archiving now supports Azure Blob Storage for cost-efficient retention.

Deploying new IRIS instances can be a time-consuming task, especially when setting up multiple environments with mirrored configurations.

I’ve encountered this issue many times and want to share my experience and recommendations for using Ansible to streamline the IRIS installation process. My approach also includes handling additional tasks typically performed before and after installing IRIS.

This guide assumes you have a basic understanding of how Ansible works, so I won’t go into much detail on its fundamentals.

Hi all,

I'm developing a Azure Pipeline to automate the deployment process in Caché.

I use selfhosted agent to execute code im my Caché Server.

My problem is that cession execution via cmd always terminate with exit code 1 and the pipeline finishes with error, but the execution in Caché is fine, the method executed returns $$$OK
I use the following line to execute a class in Caché.
C:\InterSystems\Cache\bin\csession.exe CACHE -U  %RELEASE_TRIGGERINGARTIFACT_ALIAS% "##Class(sgf.pipeline.DeploymentManager).

Overview I'm excited to announce the release of testcontainers-iris-node, a Node.js library that makes it easy to spin up temporary InterSystems IRIS containers for integration and E2E testing. This project is a natural addition to the existing family of Testcontainers adapters for IRIS, including testcontainers-iris-python and testcontainers-iris-java.

Why testcontainers-iris-node? As a Node.js developer working with InterSystems IRIS, I often faced challenges when setting up test environments that mimic production. testcontainers-iris-node solves this by leveraging the testcontainers-node framework to create isolated IRIS environments on-demand.

This is particularly valuable for:

• Integration testing with IRIS databases
• Testing data pipelines or microservices
• Automating test environments in CI pipelines

Features

• Launches IRIS in Docker containers using Testcontainers
• Supports custom Docker images and configuration
• Wait strategies to ensure IRIS is ready before tests begin
• Clean teardown between test runs

InterSystems is pleased to announce the General Availability (GA) of the 2025.2 release of InterSystems IRIS® data platform. This is a Continuous Delivery (CD) release. Please note that the GA versions of InterSystems IRIS for Health™ and HealthShare® Health Connect™ 2025.2 are currently withheld due to mirroring limitations introduced by security updates (details below).

Release Highlights

This release introduces impactful enhancements across security, developer experience, operations, and interoperability. Notable new features include:

1.

Hi all,

I'm exited to announce a GitHub Action to do direct deploy code from a github repository direct to a IRIS Instance.

Pleas visit https://openexchange.intersystems.com/package/Github-Action-IRIS-Deployer

When you deploy code from a repo, class (file) deletion might not be reflected by your CICD system.
Here's a simple one-liner to automatically delete all classes in a specified package that have not been imported. It can be easily adjusted for a variety of adjunct tasks:

set packages = "USER.*,MyCustomPackage.*"set dir = "C:\InterSystems\src\"set sc = $SYSTEM.OBJ.LoadDir(dir,"ck", .err, 1, .loaded)
set sc = $SYSTEM.OBJ.Delete(packages _ ",'" _ $LTS($LI($LFS(loaded_",",".cls,"), 1, *-1), ",'"), "/generated=0", .err2)

The first command compiles classes and also returns a list of loaded classes. The second command deletes all classes from specified packages, except for the classes loaded just before that. Any generated classes are also skipped since they won't be in the loaded list.

I am developing locally on my IRIS instance using VSCode and client-side editing approach. How can I automatically export a single .cls file/a whole package to a remote TEST/PREPROD server using a script or command line and recompile the unit remotely? Are there any more simple and straightforward ways than CI/CD explained in the series of articles by Eduard?

InterSystems announces General Availability of InterSystems IRIS, InterSystems IRIS for Health, and HealthShare Health Connect 2024.3

The 2024.3 release of InterSystems IRIS^® data platform, InterSystems IRIS^® for Health, and HealthShare^® Health Connect is now Generally Available (GA).

Release Highlights

In this release, you can expect a host of exciting updates, including:

1. Much faster extension of database and WIJ files
2. Ability to resend messages from Visual Trace
3. Enhanced Rule Editor capabilities
4. Vector search enhancements
5. and more.

I was watching this video about IRIS and GitHub and all is clear to me how it works and how code from each branch is getting deployed to each IRIS environment but the process to deploy is manual. My question is how can I, if possible, to utilize gti-source-control from GitLab CICD pipeline to deploy code automaticaly after PR approval instead going to the Git UI?

Thanks

I have created some example Ansible modules that add functionality above and beyond simply using the Ansible builtin Command or Shell modules to manage IRIS. You can use these as an inspiration for creating your own modules. My hope is that this will be the start of creating an IRIS community Ansible collection.

• I am assuming you are already familiar with Ansible. For example see the community post: Ansible Community Post
• This post follows up on my 2024 Global Summit presentation.

Welcome to the next chapter of my CI/CD series, where we discuss possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. Today, we continue talking about Interoperability, specifically monitoring your Interoperability deployments. If you haven't yet, set up Alerting for all your Interoperability productions to get alerts about errors and production state in general.

Inactivity Timeout is a setting common to all Interoperability Business Hosts. A business host has an Inactive status after it has not received any messages within the number of seconds specified by the Inactivity Timeout field. The production Monitor Service periodically reviews the status of business services and business operations within the production and marks the item as Inactive if it has not done anything within the Inactivity Timeout period. The default value is 0 (zero). If this setting is 0, the business host will never be marked Inactive, no matter how long it stands idle.

In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

• Git 101
• Git flow (development process)
• GitLab installation
• GitLab Workflow
• Continuous Delivery
• GitLab installation and configuration
• GitLab CI/CD
• Why containers?
• Containers infrastructure
• CD using containers
• CD using ICM
• Container architecture

In this article, we would talk about building your own container and deploying it.

In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

• Git 101
• Git flow (development process)
• GitLab installation
• GitLab Workflow
• Continuous Delivery
• GitLab installation and configuration
• GitLab CI/CD
• Why containers?
• Containers infrastructure
• CD using containers

In the first article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software.

In the second article, we covered GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process and Continuous Delivery.

In the third article, we covered GitLab installation and configuration and connecting your environments to GitLab

In the fourth article, we wrote a CD configuration.

In the fifth article, we talked about containers and how (and why) they can be used.

In the sixth article let's discuss main components you'll need to run a continuous delivery pipeline with containers and how they all work together.

In this article, we'll build Continuous Delivery configuration discussed in the previous articles.

In the vast and varied SQL database market, InterSystems IRIS stands out as a platform that goes way beyond just SQL, offering a seamless multimodel experience and supporting a rich set of development paradigms. Especially the advanced Object-Relational engine has helped organizations use the best-fit development approach for each facet of their data-intensive workloads, for example ingesting data through Objects and simultaneously querying it through SQL. Persistent Classes correspond to SQL tables, their properties to table columns and business logic is easily accessed using User-Defined Functions or Stored Procedures. In this article, we'll zoom in on a little bit of the magic just below the surface, and discuss how it may affect your development and deployment practices. This is an area of the product where we have plans to evolve and improve, so please don't hesitate to share your views and experiences using the comments section below.

IRIS configurations and user accounts contain various data elements that need to be tracked, and many people struggle to copy or sync those system configurations and user accounts between IRIS instances. So how can this process be simplified?

In software engineering, CI/CD or CICD is the set of combined practices of continuous integration (CI) and (more often) continuous delivery or (less often) continuous deployment (CD). Can CI/CD eliminate all our struggles?

I work in a team which develops and deploys IRIS clusters. We run IRIS in containers on Red Hat OpenShift container platform.

Hi Developers,

Enjoy watching the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Real-World CI/CD: Keep Calm & Build On @ Global Summit 2022

Can someone confirm that HealthShare Health Connect 2022.2 is the correct latest release that is available via the Online Distribution? I tried looking at the HealthShare Health Connect on WRC and now do not see a 2022.2 or 2022.3 version. Is this correct? So I shouldn't be running 2022.2? Did Health Connect get renamed? A couple of months ago I downloaded HealthConnect-2022.2.0.368.0-lnxrh8x64 but not seeing it now on the WRC site.

Some Usage cases

1. A deployment may consist of two high availability instances and two disaster recovery instances in a different data center.

The corresponding UAT environment could replicate this giving a total of 8 instances. How do you confirm CPF and Scheduled task alignment across ALL instances.

2. Another team (possibly in anther organization) makes changes to an IRIS instance to correct a problem, improve security, or modify shared system task configuration. Capture the CPF before and after to see what was done across instances.

Welcome to the next chapter of my CI/CD series, where we discuss possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab.

Today, let's talk about interoperability.

Issue

When you have an active interoperability production, you have two separate process flows: a working production that processes messages and a CI/CD process flow that updates code, production configuration and system default settings.

Clearly, CI/CD process affects interoperability. But questions are:

• What exactly happens during an update?
• What do we need to do to minimize or eliminate production downtime during an update?

After almost four years on hiatus, my CI/CD series is back! Over the years, I have worked with several InterSystems clients, developing CI/CD pipelines for different use cases. I hope the information presented in this article will be helpful to someone.

This series of articles discusses several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab.

We have an exciting range of topics to cover: today, let's talk about things beyond the code - namely configurations and data.

I would say it is a post of pain after years of using InterrSystems IRIS Docker images in many projects.

And I hope InterSystems will hear me and do something with it.

We have a lot of issues with Docker images, but I see no progress in solving them.

• containers.intersystems.com - any new releases substitute previous versions, makes build useless
  • ARM64 images have separate names, and it makes a pain to use them
• flags in iris-main, appears and disappears from version to version, which may fail the start the container
• healthcheck does not work as expected

I have followed the Article: Continuous Delivery of your InterSystems solution using GitLab, On our own Linux environment it works well but when I try to run it on a clients windows server; and the following command is run by the runner

irissession IRISHEALTH -U TEST "##class(isc.git.GitLab).load()" 

we get the following "error"

<NOTOPEN>>

I do not know why this happens, it does look like it has something to do with user rights but I am totally lost at this point as we have done everything I can think off relating to grant correct access etc.

The Data Platforms team is very pleased to announce the 2021.2 release of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, InterSystems IRIS for Health and HealthShare Health Connect, which are now Generally Available (GA) to our customers and partners.

Release Highlights

InterSystems IRIS Data Platform 2021.2 makes it even easier to develop, deploy and manage augmented applications and business processes that bridge data and application silos.

If you're deploying to more than one environment/region/cloud/customer, you will inevitably encounter the issue of configuration management.

While all (or just several) of your deployments can share the same source code, some parts, such as configuration (settings, passwords) differ from deployment to deployment and must be managed somehow.

In this article, I will try to offer several tips on that topic. This article talks mainly about container deployments.

Hello,

I have a question about defining properties for various of services, operations and processes in Productions. Let’s say I have developed a container running an IRIS instance with a single namespace and a production with pre-defined set of components. I’m planning to deploy this container to dev, staging and production environments. These different environments use different settings for the operations, etc. For example, dev-environment could use some test endpoint for an HTTP component, e.g. https://testdomain.com/test and production environment https://proddomain.com/prod.

Folks, 

I am looking to migrate a few legacy debt collection applications built using InterSystems Cache to AWS. Does anyone here have any experience, ideas and best practices on migrating Cache products to the public cloud?

Regards

Sudarshan

+1-917-685-3551

I am pleased to announce the availability of InterSystems Container Registry. This provides a new distribution channel for customers to access container-based releases and previews. All Community Edition images are available in a public repository with no login required. All full released images (IRIS, IRIS for Health, Health Connect, System Alerting and Monitoring, InterSystems Cloud Manager) and utility images (such as arbiter, Web Gateway, and PasswordHash) require a login token, generated from your WRC account credentials.