Deploying Ottehr on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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This documentation explains how to deploy Ottehr using Amazon Web Services (AWS). We also have a guide for deploying using Google Cloud Platform (GCP). If you want to deploy Ottehr on another provider, please open an issue on GitHub (opens in a new tab).

Deploying Ottehr to AWS involves three steps:

  1. Set up your Ottehr environment, following the instructions in the Ottehr repository (opens in a new tab).
  2. Configure your local AWS profile for Ottehr and add it to your Ottehr config (opens in a new tab).
  3. Run the deploy script

If you want to experiment with Ottehr but don't want to deploy it, follow the steps in the Ottehr readme (opens in a new tab) to set it up on your computer.

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Please read the guide Developing and Building Apps before storing patient health information on Oystehr

Deploying

Set up your Ottehr Environment

Follow the instructions in the Ottehr repository (opens in a new tab) to set up your Ottehr environment. You will need to fill in all of the configuration files as described in the instructions.

For example, to deploy to the staging environment, you will need:

deploy/backend.config
deploy/staging.tfvars
packages/zambdas/.env/staging.json

You will add your AWS profile to the Ottehr configuration in the next step. AWS deploy also supports specifying domains for the Patient Portal and EHR CloudFront distributions, and certificate domains for looking up TLS certificates in ACM. See the AWS Variables (opens in a new tab) section in the Ottehr repository for more information.

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Each Ottehr environment must have a separate Oystehr Project.

Configure your local AWS profile

  1. If you do not have an AWS account, create one (opens in a new tab)
  2. Install the AWS CLI (opens in a new tab)
  3. Navigate to AWS IAM (opens in a new tab)
  4. Click Users in the left-hand menu
  5. Click Create User
  6. Enter a name for the user and click Next
  7. Click Attach policies directly
  8. Search for AdministratorAccess, select it, click Next
    Screenshot of AWS IAM including the policy AdministratorAccess
  9. Click Create user
  10. Click the user name to choose the user
  11. Click Create access key
    Screenshot of AWS IAM including the option to create an access key
  12. Click Command Line Interface (CLI), Check the "I understand" box, click Next
    Screenshot of AWS IAM including the option to create an access key
  13. Click Create access key
  14. Save the Access key ID and Secret access key in a secure location
  15. Run the following command in your terminal to configure your ottehr AWS profile:
aws configure --profile ottehr

Enter the Access key ID and Secret access key when prompted. For default region name and default output format, press Enter key.

Add your AWS profile to the Ottehr configuration. For example, for a staging environment:

# In deploy/staging.tfvars
aws_profile = "ottehr"

Run the deploy script

There are npm scripts for common environments included in the Ottehr repository. For example, to deploy to the staging environment, run:

# From deploy/ directory
npm run apply-staging

The script will take about 15 minutes to run and will deploy Ottehr to your AWS account.

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