Oracle Cloud Infrastructure command line client and object storage


Yesterday I blogged about a Google Drive client, and 2 years back a blogged about a custom workflow I was using to push and pull file(s) from/to Google Drive on Linux. I recently got access to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure so thought doing an equivalent task might be a good way to get my toes wet.

As with most of the cloud infrastructure platforms available, Oracle provides us with a command line tool we can use. This project source code is open sourced (under UPL 1.0 and Apache 2.0) and hosted over on GitHub. Christoph Ruepprich has previously blogged about this tool, but I wanted to go through it myself - so a lot of this information may be redundant if you already followed along with his blog post.

For my test case, I wanted to test in an isolated environment so I went ahead and pulled the latest ubuntu release using Docker:

docker pull ubuntu:latest

Then I enter that environment by running:

docker run -it ubuntu:latest

This will bring me to a shell prompt with root access. Some initial steps you will want to do is install some needed packages along with some extras that may be helpful in testing with.

apt-get update
apt-get install python3 python3-distutils curl jq

Before we move onto to installing the client, we will need to gather some information. First, go ahead and grab your user OCID and your tennancy OCID.

So first, go to the OCI console: https://console.us-ashburn-1.oraclecloud.com/

User OCID is accessed by going to user settings









And the tenancy OCID is accessed by opening the hamburger menu and accessing tenancy details.


note: all this is documented on Oracle's documentation here: https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/API/Concepts/apisigningkey.htm#Other

So, with that information gathered, let's now go ahead and create a bucket to store our files. This is done through Object Storage within Core Infrastructure.






Then create a bucket that you will store your files in.

Now with all that done, we can move on to installing the client.

Per the documentation of the client (on the GitHub project page), run the following command:

bash -c "$(curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oracle/oci-cli/master/scripts/install/install.sh)"

Throughout this process, you should see the following prompts:

===> In what directory would you like to place the install? (leave blank to use '/root/lib/oracle-cli'):
===> In what directory would you like to place the 'oci' executable? (leave blank to use '/root/bin'):
===> In what directory would you like to place the OCI scripts? (leave blank to use '/root/bin/oci-cli-scripts')
===> Modify profile to update your $PATH and enable shell/tab completion now? (Y/n):

For the example, I just left everything as default.
You will also want to set some environment variables before trying to use the tool (it will prompt you to set these if they are not set).

export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8
export LANG=C.UTF-8

Since, I'm not re-initialising my shell, I'm also going to set my path so that it included the oci tool:

export PATH=$PATH:/root/bin

Now, the next step is to store the config about your cloud infrastructure. So run the following command and fill out the prompts that we retrieved in previous steps

oci setup config

You should see prompts:

Enter a location for your config [/root/.oci/config]:
Enter a user OCID:
Enter a tenancy OCID:
Enter a region (e.g. ca-toronto-1, eu-frankfurt-1, uk-london-1, us-ashburn-1, us-gov-ashburn-1, us-gov-chicago-1, us-gov-phoenix-1, us-langley-1, us-luke-1, us-phoenix-1):
Do you want to generate a new RSA key pair? (If you decline you will be asked to supply the path to an existing key.) [Y/n]:
Enter a directory for your keys to be created [/root/.oci]:
Enter a name for your key [oci_api_key]:
Enter a passphrase for your private key (empty for no passphrase):

So, now we need to upload the public key into the cloud infrastructure so you can be authenticated. Output the contents of your public key and then copy it into your public keys within your user settings page. Depending on what you configuration looks like, you may output the public key with a command like:


cat /root/.oci/oci_api_key_public.pem









So, with that all done you should now be able to perform commands against your OCI instance. A good initial test is to list all compartments:

oci iam compartment list --all




Now, with that done, lets play around with what we're here for. Downloading and Uploading files.

If you run oci without any arguments, you will see a list of all available sub-commands. A quick scan of this list we can see that we want to deal with the os sub-command (short for object storage). A delve into that, and we can identify two commands we will want to use will become:

oci os object get
oci os object put

A quick scan of the documentation, we then have our full command not disimilar to the following:

oci os object get --name Portfolio.xlsx --bucket-name exampleBucket --file Portfolio.xlsx

and

oci os object put --bucket-name exampleBucket --file Portfolio.xlsx

Popular posts from this blog

Report row buttons firing a dynamic action

Image
A lot of the time on reports of data, we'll define a link column, and specify an image which is the beloved pencil icon. Which is good and all, but looking in the Sample Database Application (packaged application), they have taken a different approach to style links - a button that stretches the width of it's containing cell. So, the UI ends up looking like so: So, is this done? Well first, you define a new column for the placeholder. Suppose I want my link column to be Report, I define an extra column in my query: , 'Report' report_link Then I need to go to my new column's attributes, and change the column type to a link. And, in the link attributes, set the text to what you want displayed. Here, I'm just going to display the value of the new column and point to my desired page. So I set the target page, then also the Link text as #REPORT_LINK#. At this point the report will just show link text, as we expect. So, then to replicate t
Read more

Accessing the last request value from a page submission

Image
When you submit the page, you will typically have page processes that run. For me, I use these request values to determine which processes are run. This is rather straight forward for on submit processes as you can just specify the condition request = Expression 1 Or, if you have multiple requests that link to this process, Request is Contained within Expression 1, and Expression 1 would be a comma delimited set of values. Request simply refers to the bind variable :REQUEST (or apex_application.g_request). If we try and do the same on a page rendering process, we no longer have access to this value - which makes sense. If you update the branch, to set the request portion of the URL, we will then be able to access the bind variable :REQUEST in all page rendering processing points. This has the obvious downside that if the user wants to reload the page,  clicks in the address bar and hits enter (or clicks refresh), the processes on that condition
Read more

Installing Oracle Instant Client on Ubuntu

Now that Oracle has enabled us to download instant client without any click through for accepting the license , I wanted to revisit a seamless install of the instant client on a new set up. Ubuntu has the documentation about installing the instant client here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Oracle%20Instant%20Client. First - because Oracle provides their releases in RPM archive format (or a tarball), in order to have an installer you need to create a DEB archive. There is a package in the archives, alien, which aids this process. This gives the start of the script: #!/bin/bash # Install dependencies sudo apt install alien The 3 packages the Ubuntu documentation tells us to retrieve are: - devel - basic (I opt for basiclite instead) - sqlplus So, over at the downloads page: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/instant-client/linux-x86-64-downloads.html we can grab the link. # Download files. Example specific to 19.3 # Some links were not correct on the do
Read more