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Oracle XE & APEX

The goal of the OXAR (pronounced "Oscar") project is to make it easy for developers to quickly build and/or launch a fully functional instance of Oracle XE and APEX. The scripts provided in this project handle the automatic build.

Note: Currently this build lacks a backup script. It is recommended to do your own backup

For more information and to signup for our email list go to oraopensource.com. You can follow the related blogs on this project here.

If you need additional help, there is a How-To video for this installation which walks you through the entire process.

Current Software Versions

Node.js Tools

Supported OS's

This script currently works on the following Linux distributions

Deployment Options

Build

You can build your own VM with the following instructions.

Download

Native Build

#Ensure user is currently root
if [ "$(whoami)" != "root" ]; then
  sudo -i
fi

cd /tmp

#Install Git
if [ -n "$(command -v yum)" ]; then
  #RHEL type OS
  yum install git -y
else
  #Debian type OS
  apt-get install git-core
fi

git clone https://github.com/OraOpenSource/oxar.git
cd oxar

Vagrant

Run the following on your host machine (you will need git installed on your host machine):

git clone https://github.com/OraOpenSource/oxar.git
cd oxar

Configure

Regardless of whether you're doing a native or Vagrant based build, you will need to modify the config.properties file prior to running the installation script. At a minimum, you will need to replace the CHANGME tokens to point to the appropriate files. Read below for help on modifying this file. If doing a Vagrant install, you can modify config.properties using your local text editor.

#Hints for vi:
#Type:<esc key>?CHANGEME   to search for CHANGEME
#Once done modifying an entry, hit <esc> and type: n  to search for next entry

vi config.properties

Files

Due to licensing requirements, you must download the Oracle installation files and modify the following parameters in the config file with the location of these files.

These can be references to files on a web server or to the location on the server. Some examples:

#Assuming the file resided on myserver.com
OOS_ORACLE_FILE_URL=http://myserver.com/oracle-xe-11.2.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm.zip
#Assuming the file is placed in the /tmp folder on the machine
OOS_ORACLE_FILE_URL=file:///tmp/oracle-xe-11.2.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm.zip

You can copy files from your local machine to the remote server easily using scp. Example:

scp oracle-xe-11.2.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm.zip [email protected]:/tmp

File Help

To assist getting your Oracle installation files configured for OXAR one approach is to use Dropbox. Once you have downloaded the install files, store them on dropbox and then reference them using the Shared Link feature. Note that you need to change the ...?dl=0 to a ...?dl=1 at the end of the file. For copyright purposes you should only use these links for your OXAR install and not share them publicly.

Instead of having to use vi to edit the file you can use sed to find and replace. An example is as follows: (Note: the escaping of forward slashes (/) in the URL)

sed -i 's/OOS_ORACLE_FILE_URL=CHANGEME/OOS_ORACLE_FILE_URL=https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/s\/SHAREDLINKCODE\/oracle-xe-11.2.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm.zip?dl=1/g' config.properties
sed -i 's/OOS_APEX_FILE_URL=CHANGEME/OOS_APEX_FILE_URL=https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/s\/SHAREDLINKCODE\/apex_5.0.3_en.zip?dl=1/g' config.properties
sed -i 's/OOS_ORDS_FILE_URL=CHANGEME/OOS_ORDS_FILE_URL=https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/s\/SHAREDLINKCODE\/ords.3.0.2.294.08.40.zip?dl=1/g' config.properties
sed -i 's/OOS_SQLCL_FILE_URL=/OOS_SQLCL_FILE_URL=https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/s\/SHAREDLINKCODE\/sqlcl-4.2.0.16.049.0843-no-jre.zip?dl=1/g' config.properties

Files-Vagrant

Vagrant automatically maps your current folder to /vagrant on its VM. You can copy your files to the subdirectory files in oraclexe_apex (on your host machine) and reference them with /vagrant/files/<filename>. The files subdirectory has been added to .gitignore to exclude the installation files from version control.

Example:

OOS_ORACLE_FILE_URL=file:///vagrant/files/oracle-xe-11.2.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm.zip

Modules

You can optionally chose which modules you want installed. This install supports the following optional modules which can be modified in config.properties

APEX

There are additional APEX configurations that you may want to make in the scripts/apex_config.sql file. You can run them later on or manually configure them in the APEX admin account.

Vagrant

By default you don't need to configure anything, however you may want to modify various things about your Vagrant machine. To do so, modify Vagrantfile.

Build

To build the server run the following commands. It is very important that you run it starting from the same folder that it resides in.

Native Install

. build.sh

Vagrant

vagrant up

Add-ons

OXAR now supports 3rd party add-ons to be included into OXAR. Current list of add-ons:

Securing the Server

If you use OXAR in a production instance or is available on the internet it is recommended that you lock down certain features. Review our Securing System document.

How to connect

Oracle / SQL*Plus / SQLcl

There are many different ways to connect to Oracle with SQL*Plus. The How to Connect to Oracle document covers them.

To start/stop/restart Oracle run the following commands:

/etc/init.d/oracle-xe start
/etc/init.d/oracle-xe stop
/etc/init.d/oracle-xe restart

APEX

To connect to APEX go to http://<server_name>/ or https://<server_name>/ and it will direct you to the APEX login page.

APEX Web Listener

This project uses Node4ORDS as a web listener. The Node4ORDS project provides the ability to serve static content and will provide additional web server functionality. Please read its documentation for more information.

Node4ORDS is installed in /opt/node4ords. It can be controlled by:

pm2 start node4ords --watch
pm2 stop node4ords
# For older versions of OXAR
# systemctl start node4ords
# systemctl stop node4ords

Static content can be put in /var/www/public/ and referenced by http://<server_name>/public/<filepath>. More information about the web listener configuration can be found at the Node4ORDS project page.

SSL

OXAR now supports SSL out of the box with an unsigned certificate. For configurations options and how to obtained a signed certificate read the SSL docs

ORDS

Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) allows web servers (such as Tomcat) to connect serve up APEX pages. It is located in /ords

The APEX images are stored in /ords/apex_images

Since ORDS is a module that is added to Tomcat, there is no direct stop/stop commands for it. To restart ORDS, restart Tomcat.

Tomcat Manager

This server uses Apache Tomcat as the web container for ORDS. By default, the firewall restricts public access to the Tomcat server directly. Note: To access APEX, you do not need to reference Tomcat directly (via port 8080 by default). Connecting to Tomcat is only required for additional debugging or configuration.

If you do want to make it accessible run:

service firewalld start
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-service=tomcat

You can then access Tomcat Manager via http://<server_name>:8080/manager or Application Express via http://<server_name>:8080/ords

By default the admin account is tomcat/oracle

To disable Tomcat firewall access run: note: if you don't disable it, the next time the server is rebooted it will be disabled.

firewall-cmd --zone=public --remove-service=tomcat

Tomcat is located in /usr/share/tomcat/. Tomcat can be controlled by:

systemctl stop tomcat@oxar
systemctl start tomcat@oxar

Shell Access for Vagrant

For VM created by Vagrant, the following user accounts can be used to access the VMs via SSH:

Port Configurations

The default port settings are as follows:

Optional ports can be configured inconfig.properties in the FIREWALL section. If you want to modify the firewall settings after running the build script, open scripts/firewalld.sh and look for examples on how to open (both temporarily and permanently).

To start/stop the Firewall:

systemctl start firewalld
systemctl stop firewalld

Vagrant Port Mapping

The following ports are mapped to the host and can be configured in Vagrantfile:

** See Port Configurations.

Other

OS Utility Scripts

When setting up a new server their are some common things that you may want to do such as creating a new user, disabling root SSH access, etc. Though these tasks are outside the goal of this project, we've created a new folder utils/os to store some of these common scripts which may help when setting up a new server.

Oracle Utility Scripts

This install uses some common Oracle scripts that may be useful to run at a later time. For example, the create_user.sql, creates a user with all the necessary privileges to start using. For more info, go to the oracle folder.

Editing server files locally

To make it easier to edit files on the server (and avoid using vi), Remote-Atom (ratom) is installed by default. This requires that you have the Atom text editor on your desktop and have installed the ratom.

When you connect to the server use the following connection string:

ssh -R 52698:localhost:52698 <username>@<server_name_or_ip_address>

Note: Port 52698 is the default port and can be changed in the plugins settings in Atom

Once you're connected, to edit a file locally, simply type:

ratom <myfile>

The file will then appear in your Atom editor.