Offline installation or upgrade

In order to install or upgrade OpenREM on a Windows server that does not have access to the internet you will need to download all the packages and dependencies on another computer and copy them across.

If you have trouble when installing the Python packages on Windows due to incorrect architecture, you may need to either download on a Windows system similar to the server (matching 32-bit/64-bit), or to download the files from http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ instead. Alternatively there are ways to tell pip to download binary packages for specific platforms.

It is expected and highly recommended that server operating systems have access to security updates even when other internet access is blocked.

The instructions that follow are for a Windows server that doesn’t have access to the internet. For Linux servers, it is recommended to allow access to the distribution’s repositories to install and update the software. It is technically possible to use a local repository mirror/cache, or to download all the packages manually, but this is beyond the scope of these instructions.

An Offline Docker installation might be easier on an offline Linux server, once Docker and Docker Compose are installed.

On a computer with internet access

Download independent binaries

Download all the software in the Installing packages section except IIS:

  • Python

  • Orthanc

  • PostgreSQL

  • gettext

  • Pixelmed

  • dcmtk

  • 7Zip

  • Notepad++

  • WinSW

Download Python packages from PyPI

In a console, navigate to a suitable place and create an empty directory to collect all the packages in, then use pip to download them all - Python 3 (including Pip) will need to be installed on the computer with internet access to download the packages, ideally Python 3.10:

C:\Users\me\Desktop> mkdir openremfiles
C:\Users\me\Desktop> pip3 download -d openremfiles pip
C:\Users\me\Desktop> pip3 download -d openremfiles openrem==1.0.0b2
C:\Users\me\Desktop> pip3 download -d openremfiles wfastcgi

Copy everything to the Server

  • Copy this directory plus the binaries to the offline server.

On the server without internet access

Follow the Native Windows install, Upgrading to a new Windows server, or Upgrading a native Windows install instructions, installing the binary packages that were copied across as well as IIS. The Install OpenREM section has instructions on how to install OpenREM python packages from the folder you have copied across.