#Deployment

Hi, this post was initially written for Caché. In June 2023, I finally updated it for IRIS. If you are revisiting the post since then, the only real change is substituting Caché for IRIS! I also updated the links for IRIS documentation and fixed a few typos and grammatical errors. Enjoy :)

In this post, I show strategies for backing up InterSystems IRIS using External Backup with examples of integrating with snapshot-based solutions. Most solutions I see today are deployed on Linux on VMware, so a lot of the post shows how solutions integrate VMware snapshot technology as examples.

I am working with a client to try and export a set of tasks defined in the Task Manager from one system to another.  I am not seeing any API for this.  I can query this information in SQL.  So I tried to use the Data Export Wizard from the System Management portal in the SQL window.  Export was fine.  Importing failed with a "can't insert into read only field" error.  Looking at the class definition does not help since the implementation details are not visible.

So how would one accomplish this?  Export scheduled tasks from one system to another?

This is the second part of my long post about package managers in operating systems and language distributions. Now, hopefully, we have managed to convince you that convenient package manager and rich 3^rd party code repository is one key factor in establishing of a vibrant and fast growing ecosystem. (Another possible reason for ecosystem success is the consistent language design, but it will be topic for another day.)

In this second part we plan to discuss the practical aspects of creating a package manager in general and their projection to the Caché database environment.

Hi, Community!

Please share your experience on code deployment on production site. Do you compile ObjectScript on Production? Is it OK? 

Or you only compile on Test site and copy cache.dat to a Production?

Hello,

as you can see in title my problem is with file ccontrol. I want to install whole Ensemble with Manifest if on machine wouldn't be any, or if I somehow find out instance of Ensemble I want to only use settings from included Manifest. I read that I can use file ccontrol to solve this task.

So can someone said me, how to work with ccontrol, is there some variable or function which returns me somethig? I have read some parts of documentation about ccontrol, but nothing help me so much, so you can give me link to part in documentation, where is this desribed.

Hi Developers,

Writing a script for the application deployment can be very interesting to ensure rapid deployment without forgetting anything. config-api is a library to help developers to write configuration scripts based on a JSON document.

Implemented features :

• Set system settings.
• Set security settings.
• Enable services.
• Configure namespaces, databases, mapping.
• Export existing configuration.
• All features are exposed with a RESTful API.

This library is focused on IRIS configuration to help applications deployment.

Hi Community!

Suppose you have a working system on 8-bit Caché database and need to transfer the solution to Unicode database.

How do you manage that?

Since IRIS 2020.1, changed the way how embedded SQL compiled. Now it compiles upon the first execution of such queries.

Is there any way, I could switch that feature back to the previous behavior, or get some more control over it?

We deliver our software as deployed, and we would like to have it well prepared. Another solution would suit us, if we could change the generated classname of the cached query to something which we would be possible to map. At the moment it generates classes %sqlcq.NAMESPACE, but our customers may use different namespaces.

I'm working on a proposal for a deployment tool development project and I was wondering if anyone had any experience with such a thing.  

We use Healthshare and implementations for new clients are tedius and lengthy.  Lots of ensemble service, registry value, lookup tables, namespaces and other things have to be created and configured. 

I would like to create a Zen or CSP page based deployment tool that can do all this with a few parameters and some custom code.

Has anyone done this?  What are some pitfalls you ran into?  Any unique ideas you included?  Other general thoughts?

I understand this is a rather broad topic (and at times involves religious sentiments) yet I would like to look at it from the Caché perspective:

• Do you use an issue tracking / collaboration system? If so which one. Any you would recommend or immediately dismiss based on personal experience?
• How do you keep track of large code bases? Thousdands of folders named backup1, backups2, ..., SVN, git?
• Do you have a development server to which you commit and test features there, or do you rather run a local copy of caché and implement features locally first, then push to the

Hello guys,

I have been playing around with the deployment tools from Ensemble (mostly based on this article https://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KE…;, but so far the one thing I still couldn't figure out is how to group files into a single "Studio project file".

By using the deployment tool UI, supposing that I want to add a bunch of custom files to my deployment file (XML), it's practically impossible because I need to add one by one.

Greetings! This article describes yet another simple way of creating installers for the solutions based on InterSystems Caché. The topic covers applications, which can be installed or completely removed from Caché with one action only. If you are still documenting installation instructions that have more than one step to do to install your application — it’s high time you automated this process. 

InterSystems supports use of the InterSystems IRIS Docker images it provides on Linux only. Rather than executing containers as native processes, as on Linux platforms, Docker for Windows creates a Linux VM running under Hyper-V, the Windows virtualizer, to host containers. These additional layers add complexity that prevents InterSystems from supporting Docker for Windows at this time.

We understand, however, that for testing and other specific purposes, you may want to run InterSystems IRIS-based containers from InterSystems under Docker for Windows.

I have a need to create a custom deployment package for our production. I can't do a full deployment of the production so I need to create a custom deployment package that will add our new classes, business processes, rest end points and transforms. I would like for the production to add and configure the business services, process and operations as well.

Does anyone have an example for doing this? 

Thanks,

Phil

Due to a new project I'm getting involved inside %Installer stuff deeper than ever I'd be happy to. Most of it was pretty easy to get, thanks to documentation, articles and SAMPLES example, while I can't dig good solution for one problem. I'm trying to import and compile some classes, willing to ignore two types of errors: 5202 (NothingToCompile) and 5373 (PredecessorClassDoesNotExist - a normal case when SNMP sampling class is compiled for the 1st time, before it was registered). 

I've tried the following: 

<If Condition='#{##class(%File).Exists("${AddonDir}/AddClasses.

Hi Developers

As you know it's very easy to publish a package to the Developers Community registry. 

But how to test it before publishing?  How to be sure that everything you introduced into module.xml is installed properly?

See the step-by-step instruction below!

Hi Developers!

Thank you for using ZPM Package Manager and contributing more and more useful packages to the public registry!

But as you already aware ZPM packages are always deployed with source code.

Do you think we need to add the option to deploy without source code - e.g. if you want to deploy a commercial package?

Will you develop commercial modules if there will be an option and deploy it with ZPM?

How do you deploy commercial applications today?

I know the next ones:

1. Place all different settings in environment variables. You have a different .env file for each environment, and you must add some code to Production for reading and setting these values. It's good for deploying into containers, but challenging for management when we have a large production. I mean, we have many settings that can vary depending on the environment: active flag, pool size, timeouts, and so on. Not only endpoints.

2. My own case.

Hi guys!

Suppose you developed a tool, framework, library on InterSystems ObjectScript for InterSystems Data Platform, share it via Open Exchange and want people to install it. 

What is the best strategy if it is a library and supposed to be called from different namespaces?

Here are the following thoughts:

1. Tool's developer should be able to use globals to read/store data the tool needs.

2. Tool's consumer should be confident, that the thing he/she installs will not harm the application's data.

3. A tool should be callable from any application's namespace.

4. Tool's installation(in general) should not request manual security changes (e.g. grant the write access to IRISLIB) and %YourClass is not an option.

5. It's easy to uninstall the tool - just delete the namespace/database (maybe delete some web-apps too).

Hi!   

I'm trying to set up a Clinical Viewer demo env with HealthShare 2024.2. 
I've done the standard installation following the doc : 

• UCR - UCR demo with IHE
• CV - CV demo

Everything works until I get to the point where I have to enable federated SSO (UCR demo - Federated SSO). Once it is activated, I can no longer access the instance through the portal, and the browser displays the following error:

Checking the messages.log, I see that every time I try to enable federated SSO and access the portal, I encounter the following error:

12/24/24-10:51:55:639 (98515) 2 [Utility.

Table of Contents

1. Purpose of the article
2. What containers are and why they make sense with IRIS
    2.1 Containers and images in a nutshell
    2.2 Why containers are useful for developers
    2.3 Why IRIS works well with Docker
3. Prerequisites
4. Installing the InterSystems IRIS image
    4.1 Using Docker Hub
    4.2 Pulling the image
5. Running the InterSystems IRIS image
    5.1 Starting an IRIS container
    5.2 Checking container status
    5.3 Executing code in the container terminal
    5.4 Accessing the IRIS Management Portal
    5.5 Connecting the container to VS Code
    5.6 Stopping or removing the container
    5.7 Setting a specific password with a bind mount
    5.8 Using durable %SYS volumes
     5.8.1 What gets stored with durable %SYS
     5.8.2 How to enable durable %SYS
6. Using Docker Compose
    6.1 Docker Compose example
    6.2 Running Docker Compose
7. Using a Dockerfile to run custom source code
    7.1 Dockerfile example
    7.2 Docker Compose example
    7.3 Understanding layers, image tagging and build vs. run time
    7.4 Source code and init script
    7.5 Building the image with Dockerfile
    7.6 Running instructions in the containerized IRIS terminal
8. Conclusion and what’s next

Hi All,

 Excluding RHEL which linux distro are used to be choice for a production cluster environment.

Regards

Hi,

I am investigating creating builds from TravisCI, which will pull the source from github.
This will also involve a code review process, pull request, etc.

It will be done in Multiple phases. The first one will not involve automated testing using TravisCI yet. It will only involve travisCI pulling the latest code from github and creating a release for testing(A deployment file in a format that can be loaded by Ensemble0)

What I want to know is: Is there a way or tool available to take the source files and create an XML file which can be used for deployment to Ensemble?

Kind regards,
Stefan

Hi, Community!

Consider I have ResourceA which is used by role RoleA in dev environment and want to deploy it with the solution on a target system.

Would you please share the best practices to make it?

Thank you in advance!

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

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.

How suitable is Docker for standalone deployment of an Ensemble version and Ensemble application together?

The context is deployment by an application partner of an integration application and the supporting Ensemble version as a single package (single file ideally), to multiple environments and to multiple customer sites.

I don't have experience with Ensemble on Docker so I'm wondering what gaps and pitfalls may exist.

Hi, Community!

Someday you find yourself having a wonderful class package which can be helpful in several projects. So it is a library package.

How to make the classes available for different namespaces in Caché? There are two ways (at least two ways familiar to me):

1. Start the name of the package with %, like %FantasticLib.SuperClass. Wrong way.

If you do that the class would be placed in %SYS and would be available in other namespaces.

This is wrong because of the two reasons:

1. The class will be wiped out with the next Caché update (as all the %SYS Namespace).

2.

Hi Developers,

In the previous article, we describe how to use config-api to configure IRIS.

Now, let's try to combine the library with the ZPM client.
The goal is to load a configuration document during zpm install at the configure phase.

For this exercise, a template repository is available here (this is based on objectscript-docker-template ).

We attempt to :

• Create a database MYAPPDATA.
• Set Globals mapping for dc.PackageSample.*.
• Add a user named SQLUserRO with read-only SQL role access.
• Add an SSL Configuration named SSLAppDefault.
• Create a REST application /rest/myapp.

Hi Community!

Do you know how to create workflow users and roles programmatically?
I use Docker for test deploy and I need to set up IRIS Interoperability using the install script.

Maybe do you know how to import/export already existing workflow users and roles?