UC Local APEX Dev

Get Oracle 26ai with APEX and ORDS running in minutes. Automate the tedious parts of local APEX development.

A containerized development environment (works with Docker, Podman, or any container runtime) that automates common tasks and lets you focus on building APEX applications.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/United-Codes/uc-local-apex-dev.git
cd uc-local-apex-dev
./install.sh

The installer asks no questions and needs 20 to 40 minutes. Then open http://localhost:8181/ords/apex. Log in to the INTERNAL workspace with the user ADMIN. The password is the ORACLE_PASSWORD value from the generated .env file.

You need Docker or Podman with the compose subcommand, SQLcl in your PATH, unzip, and curl or wget. The container needs 4GB RAM, 3 CPUs, and 35GB of disk space. For the prerequisites and the details, read the Installation Guide.

Features

Everything is a single command via the local-26ai.sh wrapper — run local-26ai.sh --help or see the Command Reference for the full list.

• ✅ One-command operations: create users, backups, clear schemas, test installs
• ✅ Create APEX workspaces and database schemas with optimal development grants
• ✅ All users automatically registered in SQLcl and VS Code for instant access
• ✅ Built-in Oracle DataPump backup and restore
• ✅ ORDS with SSL support for production-like local development
• ✅ Test APEX application installs repeatedly in isolated test schemas
• ✅ Full PL/SQL debugging support with VS Code SQL Developer
• ✅ Disk-space tooling for the 12GB Free edition: usage report, shrink, and Advanced Compression

⚠️ This is not for production use! Intentionally unsecure and optimized for ease of development. Passwords stored in plain text, security features relaxed. For local development only. To host it as a shared test database, read Host as a Test Database.

Documentation

For complete setup instructions, configuration guides, and usage examples, visit our documentation site:

📖 UC Local APEX Dev Documentation

The documentation includes:

• Installation Guide
• Common Tasks & Commands
• Backups
• Migration Guides

Contributing

If you have any ideas on how to improve this setup, please create an issue or a pull request.

I am especially thankful for improvements to the bash scripts.

Special thanks

• The contributors for their help
• Connor McDonald for his blog post on space efficiently using the Free Edition
• Tim Hall for the drop_all.sql script
• Philipp Salvisberg for helping me to figure out how to use the debugger
• Scott Spendolini for his blog post on how to add self-signed certificates to ORDS
• Matt Mulvaney for his blog post on unexpiring ORDS accounts
• The database team for providing an ARM image for the Oracle database
• The ORDS team for providing an ARM image for ORDS

The cherry on top would be Oracle making APEX patches free to download for everyone.