Get Started with GraalVM Enterprise on OCI

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers Oracle GraalVM Enterprise Edition for free to its customers. GraalVM Enterprise support is included in the Oracle Cloud subscription.

This guide focuses on installing GraalVM Enterprise on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Virtual Machine (VM) Compute Instance. For users who prefer a Bare Metal Machine instance, see this documentation. For complete beginners, start with this tutorial for creating and launching your first Linux instance.

Prerequisites

To replicate the steps in this guide, create a compute VM instance and connect to it.

Install GraalVM Enterprise

For convenience, GraalVM Enterpriise RPMs are available in the Oracle YUM repository. Each RPM is self-contained and will automatically pull in all the required dependencies.

That means that OCI customers can use the GraalVM Enterprise environment in their cloud instances by installing it with yum - a package-management utility for the Linux operating systems.

The following instructions have been tested on an OCI Compute Instance with Oracle Linux 7.9 and VM.Standard.E4.Flex with 1 OCPU and 16 GB RAM. Use the following command to connect to the OCI Compute Instance from a Unix-style system:

   ssh -i .ssh/id_rsa opc@INSTANCE_PUBLIC_IP

The .ssh/id_rsa part is the full path and name of the file containing the private SSH key, opc is the default name for the Oracle Linux image, and INSTANCE_PUBLIC_IP is the instance IP address provisioned from the console. For more details, refer to the Connecting to Your Linux Instance Using SSH tutorial.

Having connected to the instance, verify which GraalVM Enterprise RPMs are available for the installation, narrowing down the search to the latest release, and Java 11.
```
sudo yum provides graalvm21-ee-11-jdk
```
The resulting list includes both current and previous versions of all of the core package and additional features.
Find the appropriate RPM package name, and install GraalVM Enterprise with sudo yum install <package_name>. For example, to install “Oracle GraalVM Enterprise Edition JDK11 Java Development Kit”, run:
```
sudo yum install graalvm21-ee-11-jdk
```
Confirm if the installed package size is okay by typing yes at the prompt. It will install the latest version of graalvm21-ee-11-jdk which includes the JVM runtime with the Graal compiler.

After the installation, the GraalVM Enterprise binary is placed in /usr/lib64/graalvm. You can check this with:
```
ls /usr/lib64/graalvm
```
Configure environment variables to point to the GraalVM Enterprise installation for this SSH session. After the installation, the package files are placed in the /usr/lib64/graalvm directory, and binaries in bin accordingly.
- Set the PATH and JAVA_HOME environment variables in the bash configuration to point to GraalVM Enterprise with the following commands:
```
 echo "export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib64/graalvm/graalvm21-ee-java11" >> ~/.bashrc
```
```
 echo 'export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
```
- Activate this change:
```
 source ~/.bashrc
```
- Verify the values of PATH and JAVA_HOME:
```
 echo $JAVA_HOME
 echo $PATH
```
- Run the following command to confirm the version of GraalVM Enterprise JDK installed:
```
 java -version
```

Now you have a ready-to-go VM instance with GraalVM Enterprise installed.

Install Additional Features

GraalVM Enterprise consists of different features and components - JDK, Native Image, Python runtime, Node.js runtime, LLVM toolchain, etc. - each of which can be installed separately or as an add-on to an existing component. See Distribution Components List for more information.

To add additional features to GraalVM Enterprise, use the yum install <package_name> command.

Check what additional features are available for your current GraalVM Enterprise installation:
```
sudo yum provides graalvm21*
```
The printed list is enormous. If you are interested in a particular component, for example, the Python runtime, narrow down the search providing the exact package name:
```
sudo yum provides graalvm21-ee-11-python*
```
Install the component to GraalVM Enterprise with the yum install <package_name> command command. To install the Python runtime, run:
```
sudo yum install graalvm21-ee-11-python
```
Confirm if the installed package size is okay by typing yes at the prompt.

Install Native Image

Native Image is a technology to turn your Java application into a standalone native executable and has to be installed to GraalVM Enterprise core installation.

Search for Native Image PRMs available for your installation:
```
sudo yum provides graalvm21-ee-11-native-image*
```
Install Native Image using the yum install <package_name> command command. All required dependencies will be automatically resolved.
- On Oracle Linux 7.9, run:
```
 sudo yum install graalvm21-ee-11-native-image
```
  Confirm if the installed package size is okay by typing yes at the prompt.
- On Oracle Linux 8, run these commands one by one:
```
 sudo yum update -y oraclelinux-release-el8
 sudo yum config-manager --set-enabled ol8_codeready_builder
 sudo yum install graalvm21-ee-11-native-image
```
  Confirm if the installed package size is okay by typing yes at the prompt.
- On Oracle Linux 8 with dnf or microdnf default package managers, run these commands one by one:
```
 dnf update -y oraclelinux-release-el8
 dnf --enablerepo ol8_codeready_builder
 dnf install graalvm21-ee-11-native-image
```
  Confirm if the installed package size is okay by typing yes at the prompt.

Update GraalVM Enterprise

The yum package manager for Oracle Linux can be used to update an existing GraalVM installation or replace it with another version.

To update GraalVM, for example, from version 20.x to 21.x and install the distribution for Java 11 instead of Java 8, run:
```
sudo yum install graalvm21-ee-11-jdk
```
Confirm if the installed package size is okay by typing yes at the prompt.
Check the Java version to see if the update was successful:
```
java -version
```

The graalvm21-ee-11-jdk package is installed alongside graalvm20-ee-8-jdk in the /usr/lib64/graalvm directory. Note that regardless the version printed to the console, the PATH and JAVA_HOME environment variables still point to the old version. Reset the variables as described in Install GraalVM Enterprise, step 3.

Note on `yum upgrade`

The yum upgrade command can be used to update on the same year package line, for example, to upgrade from GraalVM Enterprise 21.3.3 to version 21.3.4 when this RPM package becomes available:

   sudo yum upgrade graalvm21-ee-11-jdk

Confirm if the installed package size is okay by typing yes at the prompt. If there are no newer package available, you will see the No packages marked for update message.

It will update the whole system and remove the obsolete GraalVM Enterprise installation.

Learn More

Run the Get Started with GraalVM on Oracle Linux in OCI interactive workshop to get hands-on lab experience installing GraalVM Enterprise on Oracle Linux 8 (all the necessary compute resources are provisioned).
Take the Accelerate Applications in Oracle Cloud with GraalVM Enterprise interactive lab to see how GraalVM Enterprise accelerates Java applications in Oracle Cloud.