About the APEX Runtime Environment

3.4 About the APEX Runtime Environment

Learn about the Oracle APEX runtime environment.

As with any software development life cycle, Oracle strongly recommends that you have different environments for development, testing/QA, and production. For testing and production instances, APEX supports the ability to install just a runtime version of APEX. This runtime environment minimizes the installed footprint and privileges and improves application security since in a runtime instance developers cannot inadvertently update a production application.

An APEX runtime environment enables you to run applications, but it does not provide a Web interface for administration. A runtime environment only includes the packages necessary to run your application, making it a more hardened environment. You administer the APEX runtime environment using the APEX_INSTANCE_ADMIN API and SQL Developer or SQLcl.

To ensure the security and performance of your development environment, this functionality is not available in APEX instances running in Oracle Cloud.

Scripts are provided to remove or add the developer interface from an existing instance.