Enhance Vagrant provisioning: install java and database by Martien van den Akker

In my previous blog posts (here and here), I wrote about how to create a base box and a create and start a virtual machine out of it. I started with provisioning, to have the vagrant user adapt the kernel settings, add a install user/owner and create a filesystem on an added disk.
Now let’s make the provisioning a bit more interesting and install actual software in it.

Prepare new Vagrant project

For this article I copied the project created from the previous blog. I called it ol75_db12c, since the goal is database 12c. But we’ll also add java.

Now edit the Vagrantfile, since we want a new VM with another name: So adapt the VM_NAME variable to something like "OL75U5_DB12c". You see how convenient it is to have those properties set as a global variable?
You could already try to do vagrant up to try it out. Remember, you can just do vagrant destroy to recreate it. Also remove (or don’t copy) the .vagrant subfolder, otherwise Vagrant would probably assume the box is already provisioned. If that is the case, then either do a vagrant destroy to destroy the VM altogether, or vagrant provision to just re-provision the box.

Java

In the copied project, lets start with Java. There are several possibilities to install java, you could download the RPM from OTN. But one of the recommended practice I found in installing Java on a server is to put it in a path that hasn’t got the java version (especially the update) in it. When using it to install Weblogic, for instance, this path ends up in several places in scripts. Although it’s a handfull, it’s more than once.
Upgrading java is then just bringing down the servers/services using it, backup the version and unzip/untar the new version in the same folder. And there you have it: I like a java distribution that comes in an archive.
In Oracle Support you can find it by searching for the document All Java SE Downloads on MOS (Doc ID 1439822.1). There you find the current versions of the Java SE pacakges. For this article I used the public version JDK 8 Update 172, that you can download as patch 27412872: Read the complete article here.

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