Laravel Homestead with Oracle XE 11g

This project enables you to install Oracle 11g XE on Laravel's Homestead base box, using Vagrant and Puppet.

Acknowledgements

This project was created based on the information in the following projects:

• Oracle XE 11g on Ubuntu 12.04 using Vagrant
• Laravel Homestead

Requirements

• You need to have Vagrant installed.
• The host machine probably needs at least 4 GB of RAM (I have only tested 8 GB of RAM).
• As Oracle 11g XE is only available for 64-bit machines at the moment, the host machine needs to have a 64-bit architecture.
• You may need to enable virtualization manually.

Installation

• Check out this project:

    git clone https://github.com/yajra/homestead-oracle.git
  

• Install vbguest:

    vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest
  

• Install vagrant-hostupdater: (optional)

    vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater
  

• Download Oracle Database 11g Express Edition for Linux x64. Place the file oracle-xe-11.2.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm.zip in the directory puppet/modules/oracle/files of this project. (Alternatively, you could keep the zip file in some other location and make a hard link to it from puppet/modules/oracle/files.)

• Run vagrant up from the base directory of this project. The first time this will take a while -- up to 1 hour on my machine. Please note that building the VM involves downloading Laravel's Homestead base box

Vagrant Provision

If you want to force re-provision the machine, I suggest running vagrant provision --provision-with shell for faster provisioning. This script will not include Oracle puppet scripts that takes more time to provision which is not necessary. Oracle puppet is required to only be executed once.

Oracle Default Accounts

• sys / secret
• system / secret
• homestead / secret

Connecting to Oracle

You should now be able to connect to the new database at localhost:1521/XE as system with password secret. For example, if you have sqlplus installed on the host machine you can do

sqlplus system/secret@//localhost:1521/XE

To make sqlplus behave like other tools (history, arrow keys etc.) you can do this:

rlwrap sqlplus system/secret@//localhost:1521/XE

You might need to add an entry to your tnsnames.ora file first:

XE =
  (DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = 127.0.0.1)(PORT = 1521))
    (CONNECT_DATA =
      (SERVER = DEDICATED)
      (SERVICE_NAME = XE)
    )
  )

Troubleshooting

It is important to assign enough memory to the virtual machine, otherwise you will get an error

ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system

during the configuration stage. In the Vagrantfile 512 MB is assigned. Lower values may also work, as long as (I believe) 2 GB of virtual memory is available for Oracle, swap is included in this calculation.

If you want to raise the limit of the number of concurrent connections, say to 200, then according to How many connections can Oracle Express Edition (XE) handle? you should run

ALTER SYSTEM SET processes=200 scope=spfile

and restart the database.