a month ago Oracle released official Docker images for use by developers. The images are usable on any public cloud or on premise, bare metal servers. Reason enough for me to take them for a spin.
Note that the beauty of Docker makes it irrelevant which Linux distribution you use. It is recommended to make sure the kernel is fairly recent and a current version of Docker is installed. For this blog, I used a 8GB ram virtual private server offered by Digital Ocean as they offer a one click Ubuntu 17.04 deployment with Docker preloaded, and this option will cost me $0.25 tops.
If you want to build your own virtual server locally and you use a RedHat like distribution, you might want to steal the script below. This is what I use for VirtualBox images I build with Vagrant.
#!/bin/bash
# This script installs the latest version of docker on Oracle Linux 7
cat >/etc/yum.repos.d/docker.repo <<-EOF
[dockerrepo]
name=Docker Repository
baseurl=https://yum.dockerproject.org/repo/main/oraclelinux/7
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://yum.dockerproject.org/gpg
EOF
sudo yum update -y
sudo yum install -y docker-engine
sudo systemctl enable docker.service
sudo usermod -aG docker vagrant # Change this to your user
exit 0
I wanted a bit more memory for this experiment though so I opted for the Cloud.
After you secured a Docker account and a machine with Docker Engine installed, it is time to start playing.
Let’s start with opening an ssh session and verify which Docker versions we are running for client and server.
root@OracleDockerTest:~# docker version
Client:
Version: 17.05.0-ce
API version: 1.29
Go version: go1.7.5
Git commit: 89658be
Built: Thu May 4 22:10:54 2017
OS/Arch: linux/amd64
Server:
Version: 17.05.0-ce
API version: 1.29 (minimum version 1.12)
Go version: go1.7.5
Git commit: 89658be
Built: Thu May 4 22:10:54 2017
OS/Arch: linux/amd64
Experimental: false
Ok, now that’s out of the way, we need to login. Normally when I pull a Docker container, it is some open source container on the Docker Hub which you can download without authentication. Oracle requires you to agree to their Oracle Technology Network License Agreement.
So let’s do just that:
root@OracleDockerTest:~# docker login -u blangenberg
Password:
Login Succeeded
You now need to go to the Docker store and ‘purchase’ the image. This is free for development usage. Fill out your details and accept the license agreement if you wish to do so.
After that’s done, it’s time to pull the image:
root@OracleDockerTest:~# docker pull store/oracle/database-enterprise:12.1.0.2
12.1.0.2: Pulling from store/oracle/database-enterprise
ac7c7887f8c8: Pull complete
81ec3f704f3a: Pull complete
fd46874fc55d: Pull complete
8f5143a7a3c5: Pull complete
0ef133fdc901: Extracting [=======> ] 710.2MB/4.873GB
Trying to pull before you entered your details on the website will fail your pull. I tried to do this.
root@OracleDockerTest:~# docker pull store/oracle/database-enterprise:12.1.0.2
Error response from daemon: repository store/oracle/database-enterprise not found: does not exist or no pull access
The image is pretty big. 5GB in size makes this the biggest container I have ever downloaded.
root@OracleDockerTest:~# docker pull store/oracle/database-enterprise:12.1.0.2
12.1.0.2: Pulling from store/oracle/database-enterprise
ac7c7887f8c8: Pull complete
81ec3f704f3a: Pull complete
fd46874fc55d: Pull complete
8f5143a7a3c5: Pull complete
0ef133fdc901: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:9eab68c8857582d6aac6757b51a884e4c4f86f93e2f70815dd34004e15ec9b27
Status: Downloaded newer image for store/oracle/database-enterprise:12.1.0.2
root@OracleDockerTest:~# docker images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
ubuntu latest ebcd9d4fca80 7 days ago 118MB
ubuntu xenial ebcd9d4fca80 7 days ago 118MB
ubuntu trusty 2ff3b426bbaa 7 days ago 188MB
alpine latest 02674b9cb179 12 days ago 3.99MB
**store/oracle/database-enterprise 12.1.0.2 235e2a33ea76 4 weeks ago 5.27GB**
We now need to prepare an environment file. The Oracle container will take the configuration specified in this file and use it to setup your container. Below you can find mine, which is hardly modified from the example the Docker store provides you with.
####################################################################
## Copyright(c) Oracle Corporation 1998,2016. All rights reserved.##
## ##
## Docker OL7 db12c dat file ##
## ##
####################################################################
##------------------------------------------------------------------
## Specify the basic DB parameters
##------------------------------------------------------------------
## db sid (name)
## default : ORCL
## cannot be longer than 8 characters
DB_SID=OraTest
## db passwd
## default : Oracle
DB_PASSWD=MyPasswd123
## db domain
## default : localdomain
DB_DOMAIN=ora.homecooked.nl
## db bundle
## default : basic
## valid : basic / high / extreme
## (high and extreme are only available for enterprise edition)
DB_BUNDLE=basic
## end
We are now ready for prime time.
root@OracleDockerTest:~# docker run -d --env-file env -p 1521:1521 -p 5500:5500 -it --name OraTest --shm-size="6g" store/oracle/database-enterprise:12.1.0.2
7e041e72c7fe966e4a8c3822f6ac9e0f906b56eefdaf945e96e33da429003258
env is the name of the file I created with the settings. I opened a listener on port 1521 and a webinterface on 5500. All pretty standard. My VPS has 8GB of ram, so I gave 6GB to Oracle.
root@OracleDockerTest:~# docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
7e041e72c7fe store/oracle/database-enterprise:12.1.0.2 "/bin/sh -c '/bin/..." About a minute ago Up About a minute 0.0.0.0:1521->1521/tcp, 0.0.0.0:5500->5500/tcp OraTest
I was immediately able to connect using SQL Developer
Note that Enterprise Manager Express also worked out of the box but i was unable to use it. All three of my browsers complained I had no flash installed. Didn’t bother to investigate the issue.
With this article as a reference, I will be able to setup an Oracle development environment on DigitalOcean in ~15 minutes, which is the fastest option I have in my tool belt today. Pretty impressive and straight forward!