Upgrading Individual Modules

Owned by Isaac Sears
Nov 24, 2020
1 min read

It is often useful to upgrade an individual module within OpenMRS to access new features or patch bugs without waiting for the next refapp release. The exact steps to upgrade may change depending on your operating system, but the general steps are outlined below.


  1. Stop the Reference Application.
  2. Backup the database. For example: mysqldump -u username -p openmrs > pre-upgrade-backup.sql
  3. Find the .omod file corresponding to the module you are updating and move it to another folder for safe keeping.
    • The .omod files are usually located in the /modules folder in the openmrs installation directory
  4. Download the updated .omod and move it to the /modules folder where the old .omod used to be
  5. Start the Reference Application, and verify that your module started without errors at /openmrs/owa/SystemAdministration/index.html#/module-show
    • If there were errors, you can always rollback to the previous state by stopping the Reference Application, restoring the database from the backup, and replacing the new .omod with the saved version of the old .omod from step (3)