OpenEMR Multiple Sites Module

The Multi site module allows creation of Multiple OpenEMR installations from one codebase footprint. The instance-specific files are stored in the openemr/sites/<installation-name> directory. So, for example, the 'default' installation specific files can be found at openemr/sites/default. Note that each OpenEMR installation does have its own MySQL database.

Installation of a new site

These instructions assume you have already installed OpenEMR (the 'default' site).

• Note you will need to assign read/write permissions to the openemr/sites directory for your web server
• Also note your web server will need permission to view the following files (in many installations, access to these files is restricted for security purposes):

• admin.php
• setup.php
• Also note you need to do a couple things in the setup.php script to build your multisites (you should revert these changes right after you are done for security purposes; or it's even better to delete the setup.php script completely when you are done building your multisites):

• Set the $allow_multisite_setup to true
• Set $allow_cloning_setup to true if you intend to clone a site)

• To avoid permission checking across your new site files and folders which could take lots of time, you can set $checkPermissions in setup.php to false

• Go to https://<your_server_name_or_IP_address>/openemr/admin.php
• Select 'Add New Site'
• Go through the setup step, the same as for a new installation.

• At Step 2, note the two additional options:

• Source site (pick a site to copy the configuration files from)
• Clone Source Database (if want to clone the database of a already existent site)

Upgrading

• If only upgrading the 'default' site, then just follow the standard OpenEMR upgrading instructions for your operating system.
• If also upgrading other sites, then do the following:

• Move all directories for each site

• openemr/sites/<site_id>/documents
• openemr/sites/<site_id>/edi
• openemr/sites/<site_id>/era
• openemr/sites/<site_id>/letter_templates

• Configure the openemr/sites/<site_id>/sqlconf.php file for each site

• Copy variables from the old sqlconf.php to the new one
• Set the $config variable to $config=1;

• Open admin.php in a web browser (http://<server_name>/openemr/admin.php), note see above for admin.php security

• If displayed, select 'Upgrade Database' for each site (and follow instructions)

• Update the ACL access controls for each site:

• http://<server_name>/openemr/acl_upgrade.php?site=<site_id>

Patches

• If only installing the patch for the 'default' site, then just follow the standard OpenEMR patch installation instructions for your operating system.
• If also upgrading other sites, then in addition to above, also do the following:

• Open admin.php in a web browser (http://<server_name>/openemr/admin.php)

• If displayed, select 'Patch Database' for each site

Backup/Restore

Backup and restore has some new and interesting behavior. Each site is still backed up individually, and the backup script is careful to omit the site-specific directories of other sites. The restore script has a new option to specify the site ID being restored, and when the target OpenEMR directory already exists it will preserve that directory and restore only the site-specific subdirectory. Note there is no feature at this time to back up multiple sites at once.