Installing Your First FHIR Server with Firely Server

Embarking on the journey of installing your first FHIR server can seem daunting, but with Firely Server, it becomes a simple 4 step process. Regardless of your technical background, this blog post will guide you through the setup of Firely Server with step-by-step instructions to help you meet your healthcare data interoperability needs.

While you can find more detailed instructions in our documentation, this post focuses on giving you a streamlined overview to get you up and running quickly – whether that’s on your PC, your own server or in the cloud. Firely Server can run on Windows, OSX and Linux and has a number of deployment options including Docker. In this guide, we’ll focus on installing it on a Windows PC.

Let’s dive in!

1. Obtaining a license key

To start, you’ll need a license key for Firely Server, which you can get from the Firely Server trial page on our website. Simply fill out the form, and you’ll receive the license key via email (this can take a minute), along with and the files to download Firely Server.

The Firely Server trial allows you to use Firely Server with a Microsoft SQL Server or MongoDB database, though this will require some additional configuration.

Keep in mind, the trial version has a limited uptime of 12 hours, and the license expires after 30 days. However, you can easily renew it as often as you like by requesting a new license key through the same Firely Server trial page form.

2. Downloading Firely Server

Once you’ve received your license key in your inbox, you can download Firely Server and install it on your own machine or install it via the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Installing via Azure can be an efficient way to set up a Kubernetes-based test environment quickly and can save you time if you proceed to a commercial license as it is more scalable.

3. Installing Firely Server on your own machine

Create a folder on your computer where you want to install Firely Server, such as:

C:\Firely-Server\4.0.0

Next, extract the contents of the downloaded firely-server-latest.zip file into this folder.

Then copy the firelyserver-license.json license file from step 1 into the root of the Firely Server installation folder, e.g.

C:\Firely-Server\4.0.0\firelyserver-license.json

Now, create a file in the same folder called “appsettings.instance.json“. This file will be used to store any custom configuration settings you want to apply. Open the newly created file and copy and paste the text below:

{ 
  "License": {
    "LicenseFile": "firelyserver-license.json"   
  }
}

Save and close appsettings.instance.json file.

4. Starting Firely Server

To start Firely Server, open a Command Prompt or PowerShell window and navigate to your Firely Server folder by typing in:

C:\Firely-Server\4.0.0

Then run:

dotnet firely.server.dll

Firely Server will now start, and you’ll see a number of log messages in the window.

By default, Firely Server uses SQLite as the administration database and comes preloaded with conformance resources for STU3 and R4. If you configured it to use SQL Server or MongoDB, the initial startup might take a bit longer as the resources are loaded.

Once the server is running, open your web browser and go to http://localhost:4080/. You should see a page similar to the one below:

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Firely Server.

Wrapping up

We hope this guide helped you get Firely Server up and running smoothly. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out.

Now that you have Firely Server up and running, it’s time to start interacting with it. To help get you started with that, we’ve created a handy blog on Your first interactions with your FHIR server.