Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Installing Software

Install software by enabling repositories from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regional yum servers.

Unlike the publicly available Oracle Linux yum server, the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regional yum servers mirror all Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) channels. Therefore, compute instances can access ULN content without needing to register the system with ULN.

For more information on the Oracle Linux yum servers, see Managing Software in Oracle Linux.

Connecting to the Regional Yum Server

Instances connected to the service gateway automatically have access to the regional yum servers. The $ociregion and $ocidomain yum variables specify which regional server the instance connects to.

For example, the baseurl to the _latest repository for Oracle Linux <version> is: 

https://yum$ociregion.$ocidomain/repo/OracleLinux/OL<version>/baseos/latest/$basearch/

  • Set the $ociregion variable by specifying its value in the /etc/yum/vars/ociregion file.

    If the ociregion file doesn't exist or is empty, the baseurl points to the publicly accessible Oracle Linux yum server. Typically, when you create the instance the $ociregion variable is set to point to the closest regional yum server on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service network. For example, if $ociregion is set to -phx, the baseurl expands to point to the regional yum server in Phoenix.

  • Set the $ocidomain variable by specifying its value in the /etc/yum/vars/ocidomain file.

Accessing ULN Content

To access ULN content on the regional yum servers, install the appropriate release-el<version> packages and enable the repositories that you require access to.

For example, to access the ol<version>_oci_included repository, which contains tools such as Oracle InstantClient, the Oracle Java Development Kit and Oracle Java Runtime Environment, run the following commands: 

sudo dnf install oci-included-release-el<version>
sudo dnf config-manager --enable ol<version>_oci_included

Other ULN channels are also available directly through the OCI regional yum servers. For example, to access the Ksplice channels on an Oracle Linux compute instance, you can run the following commands: 

sudo yum install ksplice-release-el<version>
sudo yum-config-manager --enablerepo ol<version>_ksplice ol<version>_x86_64_userspace_ksplice

Most of these channels are installed and available by default in the latest platform images.

Using OS Management Hub

You can use OS Management Hub to manage packages on Oracle Linux instances, including installing, removing, and updating packages. See Oracle Linux Package Management for more information.

OS Management Hub uses software sources to provide packages to instances, and to track the available updates to those packages. A software source is a collection of packages. Software sources enable you to control which packages can be installed on instances without needing to manually sign in and configure the repositories on each instance. See Managing Software Sources for more information.