Development environment setup for Spring Boot with Oracle

Hi again! I am starting a series of posts about writing Spring Boot microservice applications with the Oracle Database, I plan to cover topics like databsae access, messaging, external configuration, service discovery, fault tolerance, workflow, observability and so on. But before I get started, I wanted to document how I set up my development environment.

Personally, I work on Windows 11 with the Windows Subsystem for Linux and Ubuntu 20.04. Of course you can adjust these instructions to work on macOS or Linux.

Java

First thing we need is the Java Development Kit. I used Java 17, here’s a permalink to download the latest tar for x64: https://download.oracle.com/java/17/latest/jdk-17_linux-x64_bin.tar.gz

You can just decompress that in your home directory and then add it to your path:

export JAVA_HOME=$HOME/jdk-17.0.3
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

You can verify it is installed with this command:

$ java -version
java version "17.0.3" 2022-04-19 LTS
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 17.0.3+8-LTS-111)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 17.0.3+8-LTS-111, mixed mode, sharing)

Great! Now, let’s move on to build automation.

Maven

You can use Maven or Gradle to build Spring Boot projects, and when you generate a new project from Spring Initialzr (more on that later) it will give you a choice of these two. Personally, I prefer Maven, so that’s what I document here. If you prefer Gradle, I’m pretty sure you’ll already know how to set it up 🙂

I use Maven 3.8.6, which you can download from the Apache Maven website in various formats. Here’s a direct link for the zip file: https://dlcdn.apache.org/maven/maven-3/3.8.6/binaries/apache-maven-3.8.6-bin.tar.gz

You can also just decompress this in your home directory and add it to your path:

export PATH=$HOME/apache-maven-3.8.6/bin:$PATH

You can verify it is installed with this command:

$ mvn -v
Apache Maven 3.8.6 (84538c9988a25aec085021c365c560670ad80f63)
Maven home: /home/mark/apache-maven-3.8.6
Java version: 17.0.3, vendor: Oracle Corporation, runtime: /home/mark/jdk-17.0.3
Default locale: en, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "linux", version: "5.10.102.1-microsoft-standard-wsl2", arch: "amd64", family: "unix"

Ok, now we are going to need an IDE!

Visual Studio Code

These days I find I am using Visual Studio Code for most of my coding. It’s free, lightweight, has a lot of plugins, and is well supported. Of course, you can use a different IDE if you prefer.

Another great feature of Visual Studio Code that I really like is the support for “remote coding.” This lets you run Visual Studio Code itself on Windows but it connects to a remote Linux machine and that’s where the actual code is stored, built, run, etc. This could be an SSH connection, or it could be connecting to a WSL2 “VM” on your machine. This latter option is what I do most often. So I get a nice friendly, well-behaved native desktop applciation, but I am coding on Linux. Kind of the best of both worlds!

You can download Visual Studio Code from its website and install it.

I use a few extensions (plugins) that you will probably want to get too! These add support for the languages and frameworks and give you things like completion and syntax checking and so on:

You can install these by opening the extensions tab (Ctrl-Shift-X) and using the search bar at the top to find and install them.

Containers and Kubernetes

Since our microservices applications are probably almost certainly going to end up running in Kubernetes, its a good idea to have a local test environment. I like to use “docker compose” for initial testing locally and then move to Kubernetes later.

I use Rancher Desktop for both containers and Kubernetes on my laptop. There are other options if you prefer to use something different.

Oracle Database

And last, but not least, you will need the Oracle Database container image so we can run a local database to test against. If you don’t already have it, you will need to go to Oracle Container Registry first, and navigate to “Database,” then “Enterprise,” and accept the license agreement, then pull the image with these commands:

docker login container-registry.oracle.com -u your.name@wherever.com
docker pull container-registry.oracle.com/database/enterprise:21.3.0.0

Then you can start a database with this command:

docker run -d \
   --name oracle-db \
   -p 1521:1521 \
   -e ORACLE_PWD=Welcome123 \
   -e ORACLE_SID=ORCL \
   -e ORACLE_PDB=PDB1 \
   container-registry.oracle.com/database/enterprise:21.3.0.0

The first time yoiu start it up, it will create a database instacne for you. This takes a few minutes, you can watch the logs to see when it is done:

docker logs -f oracle-db

You will see this message in the logs when it is ready:

#########################
DATABASE IS READY TO USE!
#########################

You can then stop and start the database container as needed – you won’t need to wait for it to create the database instance each time, it will stop and start in just a second or two.

docker stop oracle-db
docker start oracle-db

You are going to want to grab its IP address for later on, you can do that with this command:

docker inspect oracle-db | grep IPAddress

This container image has SQL*Plus in it, and you can use that as a database command line client, but I prefer the new Oracle SQLcl which is a lot nicer – it has completion and arrow key navigation and lots of other cool new features. Here’s a permalink for the latest version: https://download.oracle.com/otn_software/java/sqldeveloper/sqlcl-latest.zip

You can just unzip this and add it to your path too, like Maven and Java.

You can connect to the database using SQLcl like this (use the IP address you got above):

sql sys/Welcome123@//172.12.0.2:1521/pdb1 as sysdba

Well, that’s about everything we need! In the next post we’ll get started building a Spring Boot microservice!