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My 2018 notes on installation of DHIS 2

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Note that the instructions below are now out of date

  • for example, you would need to use OpenJDK now

See Installing DHIS 2 dependencies on Linux for dependencies

The following code was run by an ordinary user with sudo privileges to install DHIS 2 (version 2.28) on Ubuntu 17.10.

Information was taken from:

First create a user called dhis.

sudo useradd -d /home/dhis -m dhis -s /bin/false

Set a password for user dhis.

sudo passwd dhis

Create a config folder for the dhis user.

sudo su
mkdir /home/dhis/config
chown dhis:dhis /home/dhis/config
exit

You can set the time zone with:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Set the locale e.g.

sudo locale-gen en_PK
sudo locale-gen en_PK.UTF-8
sudo update-locale

Install Postgres and required extensions (note that there may be later versions available on your system).

sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.5 postgresql-contrib-9.5 postgresql-9.5-postgis-2.2

Create the database user dhis and set a password (remember this password as you will need it).

sudo -u postgres createuser -SDRP dhis

Create the database dhis2.

sudo -u postgres createdb -O dhis dhis2

Create the PostGIS extension.

sudo -u postgres psql -c "create extension postgis;" dhis2

Edit a configuration file for Postgres (will have different name for later versions of Postgres). I use the Vim text editor - substitute another text editor if required.

sudo vim /etc/postgresql/9.5/main/postgresql.conf

The lines I uncommented are shown below.

max_connections = 200
shared_buffers = 3200MB
work_mem = 20MB [uncommented]
maintenance_work_mem = 512MB [uncommented]
effective_cache_size = 8000MB [uncommented]
checkpoint_completion_target = 0.8 [uncommented]
synchronous_commit = off [uncommented]
wal_writer_delay = 10000ms [uncommented]

Save and close the file.

At this point you should also do database performance tuning, which I did not do but which would be required for a production instance. I also didn’t set up database encryption but this would also be required.

Restart the database for the new configuration to take effect.

sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql restart

Configure DHIS 2 with the database settings.

sudo -u dhis vim /home/dhis/config/dhis.conf

Make the following changes at the appropriate points in that file.

connection.username = dhis
connection.password = [whatever password you chose for user dhis on the database dhis2]
encryption.password = [a strong password]

Save and close the file.

Change the permissions on the DHIS 2 configuration file.

sudo chmod 0600 /home/dhis/config/dhis.conf

Install Java (this is how I did it but there are other ways).

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

Accept the terms of use for Java.

Install Tomcat server.

sudo apt-get install tomcat7-user

Create a Tomcat instance.

cd /home/dhis/
sudo tomcat7-instance-create tomcat-dhis
sudo chown -R dhis:dhis tomcat-dhis/

Configure Tomcat server.

sudo vim /home/dhis/tomcat-dhis/bin/setenv.sh

Set Java options in this file for RAM usage for your machine.

export JAVA_HOME='/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle/'
export JAVA_OPTS='-Xmx7500m -Xms4000m'
export DHIS2_HOME='/home/dhis/config'

Change to webapps directory, download DHIS 2 WAR file and change permissions and name

wget https://www.dhis2.org/download/releases/2.28/dhis.war
sudo chown -R dhis:dhis dhis.war
sudo mv dhis.war ROOT.war

Modify the startup script.

#!/bin/sh
set -e
if [ "$(id -u)" -eq "0" ]; then
echo "This script must NOT be run as root" 1>&2
exit 1
fi
export CATALINA_BASE="/home/dhis/tomcat-dhis"
/usr/share/tomcat7/bin/startup.sh
echo "Tomcat started"

Start DHIS 2

sudo -u dhis tomcat-dhis/bin/startup.sh

There should be considerable initial CPU/RAM usage, after which the app should be visible at MACHINE_IP_ADDRESS:8080/dhis-web-commons/security/login.action. I think the default admin user name is admin and the password is admin - this should obviously be changed immediately.

Monitor for errors (lots of lines beginning “INFO” are OK).

sudo tail -f tomcat-dhis/logs/catalina.out

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