Skip to main content

An Even Faster Guide to Build A Personal Oracle APEX Instance

· 3 min read
Adrian Png
Adrian Png
Director of Innovation, AI and Cloud Solutions @ Insum, a Talan Company

ORCLAPEX Meetup Logo

Want to get started on APEX development but don't want to muck around with Linux too much, then this guide's for you! As a follow-up to our second ORCLAPEX-YVR meetup on June 17, 2015, and to supplement Trent Schafer's excellent post on how you could build an Oracle APEX instance, here's a simple procedure that you can use to stand up your personal APEX development environment in probably much less than 30 minutes depending on your Internet connection bandwidth!

This method involves the use of Vagrant and Oracle VirtualBox, and will work on any host operating system (OS) that both software supports. So let's get started!

  1. Download and save the following installation packages on your computer:
  1. Download and install Git (you may use other Git clients if preferred, e.g. SourceTree)
  2. Download and install OracleVirtualBox (version 5.0.x)
  3. Download and install Vagrant (version 1.7.x)
  4. Start a terminal session or the Command Prompt for the next few steps. Note: "vagrant" should have been added to your system path during the installation.
  5. Clone the oraclexe-apex project: $ git clone https://github.com/OraOpenSource/OXAR.git
  6. Change your working directory to oraclexe-apex $ cd OXAR
  7. Copy the installation files into files subdirectory. OXAR project folder structure
  8. Update the config.properties. Specify the location and filenames of the installation files. ![OXAR Project Configuration Changes]./assets/oraclexe-apex-project-config-changes-300x74.png)
  9. Execute the command: $ vagrant up
  10. Done! Wait for the build process to complete and then test your instance using your browser and point to http://localhost:50080/ords/. If you see the APEX login page, then you are good to go! By default, the Vagrant is configured to use the Centos 7 base box provided by Puppet Labs. If Ubuntu is preferred, then try switching the base box ubuntu/trusty64. To do so, update the vagrantfile and set the desired base box.

Change the base box used by the oraclexe-apex project For the trust64 base box provided by Ubuntu, the Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) application may not run out-of-the-box (pun intended). If the time-zone for the guest OS has not been defined, then that might result in a JDBC connection error (ORA-01882). If you encounter a similar issue, please perform the following steps to fix the problem:

  1. Login to the guest OS using SSH. The username and password are both "vagrant". $ ssh -l vagrant -p 2222 localhost
  2. Execute the command and then use the wizard to set the correct timezone for your system: $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
  3. Reboot the server: $ sudo /sbin/reboot