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.
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
For complete setup instructions, configuration guides, and usage examples, visit our documentation site:
📖 UC Local APEX Dev Documentation
The documentation includes:
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.
- 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.