From source

You can build the ehrbase binary yourself — for a platform without a published image, for local development, or to run the test suite. This chapter covers the prerequisites and the build. Most operators should prefer the published container images (Docker Compose, Kubernetes & Helm); build from source when you need to.

Prerequisites

• The pinned Rust toolchain. The repository pins Rust 1.96.1 (edition 2024) via rust-toolchain.toml, so rustup installs and selects it automatically the first time you build in the checkout — you do not choose a version by hand.
• Docker — required only for the integration tests, which spin up a real PostgreSQL 18 in a container.
• xmllint — required only for the canonical-XML tests.

Building

From the repository root:

cargo build --workspace

To build just the server binary in release mode (what the container image ships):

cargo build --release --locked -p ehrbase

The resulting binary is target/release/ehrbase. It is statically linked against a pure-Rust TLS stack — no OpenSSL, no JVM, no runtime dependencies — so it drops into a minimal base image or runs directly on the host.

Running the tests

cargo nextest run --workspace

The suite includes integration tests that start PostgreSQL 18 via testcontainers, so Docker must be running.

Running the binary

The binary is configured entirely through EHRBASE_* environment variables (see the configuration reference). At minimum it needs a database URL:

export EHRBASE_DB_URL='postgres://ehrbase:ehrbase@localhost:5432/ehrbase'
target/release/ehrbase

It runs its schema migrations at boot and then serves on the configured bind address (default 0.0.0.0:8080). The binary also has a healthcheck subcommand (used by the container healthcheck and Kubernetes exec probes) that hits the status endpoint and exits 0 or 1.

Note

Building from source gives you the same binary the images use — the container Dockerfile pins its Rust version from the same rust-toolchain.toml, and CI cross-checks the two so they cannot drift.