Using uPortal with Oracle

Step 1: Identify the Driver Version

The Oracle drivers have been available in Maven Central since mid-2019. There are several un-official packages. Make sure to use the official group.

There are also variants of OJDBC drivers. uPortal requires Java 8, so the Ojdbc8 variants are required.

As of this writing, the current version of Ojdbc8 is 19.3.0.0.

Step 2: Configure the Database Connection Properties

Configure the Database Connection in etc/portal/global.properties. For example:

hibernate.connection.driver_class=oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver
hibernate.connection.url=jdbc:oracle:thin:@//oracle.example.edu:1521/instance
hibernate.connection.username=
hibernate.connection.password=
hibernate.connection.validationQuery=select 1 from dual
hibernate.dialect=org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle10gDialect

Step 3: Add the Database Driver

In gradle.properties add a variable to manage the driver version:

oracleDriverVersion=19.3.0.0

In overlays/build.gradle add the following line below the line for hsqldb:

jdbc group: 'com.oracle.ojdbc', name: 'ojdbc8', version: "${oracleDriverVersion}"

Step 4: Build and Deploy

You can execute the command below to build the database tables and copy files to your servlet container.

Executing the command ./gradlew portalInit will drop and recreate the database tables and all existing data will be lost . This will result in a clean uPortal database structure. If you want to keep the contents of your existing database, use ./gradlew tomcatDeploy .