Installing APEX and ORDS on Oracle 18cXE on CentOS

It’s been rather a trying week.
Wales beat England in the Rugby on Saturday and every Welsh person alive has been observing the ancient tradition of rubbing English noses in it ever since.
My claim to Welsh heritage by marriage have been given short-shrift by Deb, whose accent has become rather more pronounced ever since the final whistle.

All in all, the onslaught of Welsh chauvinism has left me feeling rather like this :

Until things blow over, I’ve decided to spend more time in the shed. Fortunately, the Wifi signal is still pretty good so I’ve decided to use the free time by installing APEX 18.2 into an Oracle 18c RDBMS. As I’ve got time on my hands ( celebrations are unlikely to fizzle out for a couple of months yet), I’ve decided to follow Oracle’s recommendation and configure it to run on ORDS 18.4.
Specifically, what I’ll be covering here is :

• installing APEX 18c
• installing ORDS 18c
• configuring APEX to run on ORDS
• configuring ORDS to run on HTTPS with self-signed SSL certificates
• using systemd to start ORDS automatically on boot

That should keep me occupied for a while…

Upgrading to APEX 5 on Oracle XE 11g

It’s a Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK.
This is usually a time for doing odd-jobs as a distraction from watching the rain come down.
This time around, rather than subject you to another lament about the Great British Summer ( or lack thereof), I’m going to go through the steps needed to install APEX5 on Oracle 11gXE.

Now, I know that the documentation doesn’t mention Express Edition.
I also know that the instructions that Oracle do have for upgrading APEX on XE haven’t yet been updated to account for APEX5.
I know this because I’ve spent a wet Bank Holiday finding this stuff out the hard way so that (hopefully), you don’t have to.
What I’m going to cover here is :

• Pre-installation checks
• Getting APEX5
• Installation
• Configuration

I would say “let’s get cracking before the sun comes out”, but that would only give us until around the second week in July…