Building Windows iHRIS

Overview

This page describes how to build a customized windows installer. The installer is built on a windows machine using the Cygwin linux like environment for windows.

It is highly recommended that you build the installer in the default installation directory which is:

C:\Program Files\ihris-suite

so you should un-install the ihris-suite if you have installed on the computer that wish to build the installer on and remove this directory. All the files paths/directories below are assuming you made this choice. This is done so that when the installer is run, it does not have to spend time to reconfigure itself to its new location.

Installing Cygwin

In order to build a windows installer, you must have a cygwin installed on your computer. To do this, download and run setup.exe. You can find detailed instructions here. You will need to install the following packages:

• wget
• make
• tar
• unzip

You may wish to follow this tutorial for installing cygwin, except you should install the following package instead of the one listed in their Step 9.

Getting the installer files

Open a cygwin shell. You can do this by clicking on the cygwin icon on your desktop, or by going to Start->Programs->Cygwin->Cygwin Bash Shell. A window will appear with a prompt $. At the prompt enter the following commands

cd /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files
bzr checkout lp:offline-ihris/3.1 ihris-suite
cd ihris-suite
make

Assuming all goes well, you should have a windows installer under:

C:\Program Files\ihris-suite\Output\iHRIS-3.1.4.exe

Customizing The Installer

Before you begin customizing the installer, you should see if Using Alternate Sites in Offline iHRIS will meet your needs. You will want to build a custom installer if you have large amounts of data that you want shared among multiple installations, if you have customized your site so that is significantly different from the standard wamp installation, or if you want have a custom home page.

All of these customizations are done by adding some files under C:\Program Files\ihris-suite before you enter the command make as above.

Running SQL Scripts/Importing Data

In order that the installer runs fast, each of the sites (Manage, Qualify, Plan) are pre-initialized in the installer so that the database is already populated. You may wish also to pre-initialize the installer by running a sql script (or few) to import large amounts of data into your custom installation -- for example if you did a mysqldump of data that should be shared among district offices. You may add sql scripts to be in the following directories:

C:\Program Files\ihris-suite\databases\ihris-manage
C:\Program Files\ihris-suite\databases\ihris-plan
C:\Program Files\ihris-suite\databases\ihris-qualify

These scripts are run after the site has been (pre-)initialized.

Building a Customized Site Into the Installer

For any of the components of the iHRIS Suite, you can build a custom site into the installer. This is done by putting a custom site in the locations:

C:\Program Files\ihris-suite\site\ihris-manage
C:\Program Files\ihris-suite\site\ihris-manage
C:\Program Files\ihris-suite\site\ihris-qualify

(depending on which site you have a customization for).

Once you have a custom site built, say on a linux server, you will need to prepare the site for the windows installer. To do this, copy your custom sites to the appropriate directory above. Then you will need to roughly follow the directions in [Using Alternate Sites in Offline iHRIS], especially paying attention to the files that end with .install. You will also need to copy your site configuration file to ihris-manage-wamp.xml which is the configuration file used to pre-initialize your site. You will need to make sure that the paths to i2ce are correct. Edit ihris-manage-wamp.xml and make sure you have something akin to:

<path name='modules'>
  <value>./../../lib/ihris/</value>
</path>

You will also need to edit pages/local/config.values.php so that it the $i2ce_site_i2ce_path is as follows:

$i2ce_site_i2ce_path = "../../../lib/ihris/i2ce";

Changing the Home Page

The default home page for the apache web server that will be running on the installed machine is contained in the directory

 C:\Program Files\ihris-suite\home

If you wish to change the home page provided, create the directory

 C:\Program Files\ihris-suite\althome

and make sure that it contains index.html. When you build the installer, it will use this web root.