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Deployment
The OHIF Viewer can be embedded in other web applications via it's packaged script source, or served up as a stand-alone PWA (progressive web application) by building and hosting a collection of static assets. In either case, you will need to configure your instance of the Viewer so that it can connect to your data source (the database or PACS that provides the data your Viewer will display).
Overview
Our goal is to make deployment as simple and painless as possible; however, there is an inherent amount of complexity in customizing, optimizing, and deploying web applications. If you find yourself a little lost, please don't hesitate to reach out for help
Deployment Scenarios
Embedded Viewer
The quickest and easiest way to get the OHIF Viewer up and running is to embed it into an existing web application. It allows us to forego a "build step", and add a powerful medical imaging viewer to an existing web page using only a few include tags.
- Read more about it here: Embedded Viewer
- And check out our live demo on CodeSandbox
{% include "./_embedded-viewer-diagram.md" %}
Stand-alone Viewer
Deploying the OHIF Viewer as a stand-alone web application provides many benefits, but comes at the cost of time and complexity. Some benefits include:
Today:
- Leverage extensions to drop-in powerful new features
- Add routes and customize the viewer's workflow
- Finer control over styling and whitelabeling
In the future:
- The ability to package the viewer for App Store distribution
- Leverage
service-workersfor offline support and speed benefits from caching
Hosted Static Assets
At the end of the day, a production OHIF Viewer instance is a collection of
HTML, CSS, JS, Font Files, and Images. We "build" those files from our
source code with configuration specific to our project. We then make those
files publicly accessible by hosting them on a Web Server.
If you have not deployed a web application before, this may be a good time to reach out for help, as these steps assume prior web development and deployment experience.
Part 1 - Build Production Assets
"Building", or creating, the files you will need is the same regardless of the web host you choose. You can find detailed instructions on how to configure and build the OHIF Viewer in our "Build for Production" guide.
Part 2 - Host Your App
There are a lot of benefits to hosting static assets over dynamic content. You can find instructions on how to host your build's output via one of these guides:
Drag-n-drop
Easy
Advanced
Data
The OHIF Viewer is able to connect to any data source that implements the DICOM Web Standard. DICOM Web refers to RESTful DICOM Services -- a recently standardized set of guidelines for exchanging medical images and imaging metadata over the internet. Not all archives fully support it yet, but it is gaining wider adoption.
Configure Connection
If you have an existing archive and intend to host the OHIF Viewer at the same domain name as your archive, then connecting the two is as simple as following the steps layed out in our Configuration Essentials Guide.
What if I don't have an imaging archive?
We provide some guidance on configuring a local image archive in our Data Source Essentials guide. Hosting an archive remotely is a little trickier. You can check out some of our advanced recipes for modeled setups that may work for you.
What if I intend to host the OHIF Viewer at a different domain?
There are two important steps to making sure this setup works:
- Your Image Archive needs to be exposed, in some way, to the open web. This
can be directly, or through a
reverse proxy, but the Viewer needs some way to request it's data. - * Your Image Archive needs to have appropriate CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) Headers
* Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is a mechanism that uses additional HTTP headers to tell a browser to let a web application running at one origin (domain) have permission to access selected resources from a server at a different origin. - [MDN Web Docs: Web - Http - CORS][cors]
Most image archives do not provide either of these features "out of the box". It's common to use IIS, Nginx, or Apache to route incoming requests and append appropriate headers. You
What if my archive doesn't support DicomWeb?
This is possible to do with the OHIF Viewer, but not as straightforward. Look out for documentation on this subject in the near future.
...
Making sure your archive is accessible
- CORS
- Proxy (dangers)
- Note: PACS not meant to be directly accesible from Web
Securing your data
- Reach out to experts
- Recipes
What if my archive doesn't support DICOM Web?
- Mapping layer
- GraphQL?