SOA Suite 12c in Docker containers. Only a couple of commands, no installers, no third party scripts by Maarten Smeet

For developers, installing a full blown local SOA Suite environment has never been a favorite (except for a select few). It is time consuming and requires you to download and run various installers after each other. If you want to start clean (and you haven’t taken precautions), it could be you have to start all over again.

There is a new and easy way to get a SOA Suite environment up and running without downloading any installers in only a couple of commands without depending on scripts provided by any party other than Oracle. The resulting environment is an Oracle Enterprise Edition database, an Admin Server and a Managed Server. All of them running in separate Docker containers with ports exposed to the host. The 3 containers can run together within an 8Gb RAM VM.

The documentation Oracle provides in its Container Registry for the SOA Suite images, should be used as base, but since you will encounter some errors if you follow it, you can use this blog post to help you solve them quickly.

A short history

QuickStart and different installers

During the 11g times, a developer, if he wanted to run a local environment, he needed to install a database (usually XE), WebLogic Server, SOA Infrastructure, run the Repository Creation Utility (RCU) and one or more of SOA, BPM, OSB. In 12c, the SOA Suite QuickStart was introduced. The QuickStart uses an Apache Derby database instead of the Oracle database and lacks features like ESS, split Admin Server / Managed Server, NodeManager and several other features, making this environment not really comparable to customer environments. If you wanted to install a standalone version, you still needed to go through all the manual steps or automate them yourself (with response files for the installers and WLST files for domain creation). As an alternative, during these times, Oracle has been so kind as to provide VirtualBox images (like this one or this one) with everything pre-installed. For more complex set-ups Edwin Biemond / Lucas Jellema have provided Vagrant files and blog posts to quickly create a 12c environment. Read the complete article here.

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