How to install and configure OpenEMIS

This page contains

• Introduction to OpenEMIS features
• How to install OpenEMIS with Docker
• The three parts of the OpenEMIS Docker application
• How to configure OpenEMIS for the first time

If you already have an installation of OpenEMIS up and running and you just want to configure it, skip to the section titled Configuring OpenEMIS.

What is OpenEMIS?

OpenEMIS is an open-source data-management software package for education management. It was developed with support from UNESCO. It is a tool that be used to build sustainable education data-management systems. It can be implemented in many different ways, and this enables it to be configured for various different contexts, in both the global North and the global South. The software has many useful features that make life easier for system administrators and education authorities.

Bulk importing of data

The bulk-importer lets you import student and teacher data from an Excel spreadsheet or a csv file. This enables you to quickly migrate data from an old system without needing to manually type the data.

Managing user permissions for administrators, schools and donors

With the User/Group/Role module, the administrator can easily manage access permissions for each user. This enables them to grant access to specific schools, and specific types of student information. This can let them make school-statistics available to donors, while keeping personal student information only available to school managers.

The software is open-source

Since the community edition of the software is open-source, it is free to install and use. This helps to make the system financially accessible for low-resource projects.

Insufficient documentation for OpenEMIS configuration

The problem I found with it was that it’s very difficult to configure for first use. The project has a website https://support.openemis.org/core/en/home-en where you can find documentation explaining how to work with the software once it’s installed and configured. The documentation is quite good for this, but I found that there isn’t enough documentation explaining how to install the system, and how to configure it so that it is ready for you to enter school data and student data. If it’s not configured correctly, it gives cryptic 404 error messages, which quickly gets very frustrating.

OpenEMIS as part of a sustainable data-management system

I recently built a sustainable data-management platform for a regional education authority in Thailand. Change is inevitable in software systems and information systems, so a sustainable system must be able to be adapted and modified easily without relying on external support. The goal for this system was to create a secure online system that could then be handed over to the local IT team, who would maintain it and change it as the education-system changes.

In order to maintain the system, the local IT team needed to easily see how the platform was configured. To help make it easier for them to maintain, I wrote documentation so they could see the steps for how to configure OpenEMIS. The documentation is below. Hopefully it will be helpful for another low-resource education project and it’ll help more people to collect high-quality data and make it easier for them to show the impact.

How to install OpenEMIS

Warning: The following steps will install the OpenEMIS system on a local development server using port 80. To use the system on a production server, you will also need to configure an SSL certificate to encrypt the data.

For this project, I carried out the OpenEMIS installation using a Docker container available through Docker hub. This is an official release maintained by the OpenEMIS team, so it is likely that the project will continue to be maintained for the long-term.

Install Docker

Docker is a technology that lets you run an application inside your computer. It makes life a lot easier for developers because you can set server configurations in one file and quickly get a project up and running. Once you have docker installed, you can use it to install OpenEMIS.

The OpenEMIS Docker project has instructions for how to install Docker on your computer/server, and how to use Docker to get the OpenEMIS app: https://hub.docker.com/r/openemis/core

With Docker installed, rundocker pull openemis/core This will pull the OpenEMIS application from the docker-hub repository and install it on your server. You can see the application running by typing docker-compose up -d and visiting http://localhost:8082 By default, the OpenEMIS docker container runs on port 8082.

To stop the application, type docker-compose down

You can change the port to port 80 by editing the <project-directory>/core/docker-compose.yaml file. You should only use port 80 for a development server. When you deploy to a production server, you will need to use port 443 and an SSL certificate before deploying OpenEMIS to a production server.

You can quickly set the application to listen on port 80 by changing the docker-compose.yaml to the following (you’ll need to turn off Apache2 if it’s installed, so that it’s not listening on port 80):

ports:

    - "80:80"

A better way to set it up is to make an Apache virtual host with port forwarding, forwarding port 80 to port 8082, the default port for docker.

First, install mod_proxy and other requirements

sudo a2enmod proxy

sudo a2enmod proxy_http

sudo a2enmod proxy_balancer

sudo a2enmod lbmethod_byrequests

Next, update the virtual host to forward port 80 to port 8082.

#/etc/apache2/sites-available/openemis.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>

    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

    ProxyPreserveHost On

    ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:8082/

    ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8082/

    <Directory /var/www/html/>

        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

        AllowOverride All

        Require all granted

    </Directory>

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

    <IfModule mod_dir.c>

        DirectoryIndex index.php index.pl index.cgi index.html index.xhtml index.htm

    </IfModule>

</VirtualHost>

The docker-compose.yaml can stay at its default, listening on port 8082.

#/var/www/openemis/core/docker-compose.yaml

ports:

    - "8082:80"

The OpenEMIS Docker application

There are three parts to the OpenEMIS docker project.

1. The OpenEMIS PHP application
   1. This is where the code of the application is stored. You access it by visiting http://localhost and logging in. When you log in for the first time, you can use the default administrator login account.
   1. Username: admin
   1. Password: demo
2. MySQL database
   1. The MySQL database stores the data for your application. It will store the schools, students, and system configurations
3. phpMyAdmin
   1. This is an application that lets you connect to your MySQL database using your web-browser. You can use it by visiting http://localhost:8083 and logging in. When you log in for the first time, you can use the default administrator login account.
   1. Username: admin
   1. Password: demo