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 ULN channels. Therefore, compute instances can access ULN content without having to register the system with ULN. For more information, see:

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 determine which regional server the instance connects to.

For example, the baseurl to the _latest repository for Oracle Linux 8 is: 

baseurl=https://yum$ociregion.$ocidomain/repo/OracleLinux/OL8/baseos/latest/$basearch/

  • Set the $ociregion variable by populating content in /etc/yum/vars/ociregion.

    If the ociregion file does not 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 populating content in /etc/yum/vars/ocidomain.

Accessing ULN Content

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

For example, on Oracle Linux 8, you can run the following commands to access the ol8_oci_included repository, where tools like Oracle InstantClient, the Oracle Java Development Kit and Oracle Java Runtime Environment are located: 

sudo dnf install oci-included-release-el8
sudo dnf config-manager --enable ol8_oci_included

Other ULN channels are also available directly through the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regional yum servers. For example, to access the Ksplice channels on an Oracle Linux 8 compute instance, you can do: 

sudo yum install ksplice-release-el8
sudo yum-config-manager --enablerepo ol8_ksplice ol8_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 having to manually log in and configure the repositories on each instance. See Managing Software Sources for more information.