Installing Oracle WebLogic Server Using Docker

A simple way to get started with Docker on a Windows machine is install Docker Desktop for Windows. This is available from docker hub (https://hub.docker.com). It supports running both Linux and Windows Docker containers. In this blog I used the WSL 2 based engine which is Windows Subsystem for Linux that allows Linux containers to run without emulation.

Docker Desktop for Window

Once you installed the Docker Desktop for Windows and started it, you can easily setup WebLogic container. Before you start, create a new folder and the domain.properties file where you want to set the WebLogic administrator’s username and password. In this example domain.properties file is created in the folder dockwls in the user home directory.

domain.properties file

Open Command Prompt, run following to download the images:

docker run --name wlsnode01 -d -p 8453:8453 -p 7001:7001 -p 9002:9002 -e DOMAIN_NAME=base_domain -v "%cd%"/dockwls:/u01/oracle/properties store/oracle/weblogic:12.2.1.4-dev

Port number 8453 is for debugging which I will use later. 7001 is for the AdminServer and 9002 is for secure connection to the WebLogic Admin Console. There are generic, slim and developer image of WebLogic that can be downloaded and in this example the developer image is used.

It created a new container wlsnode01 and started:

If the container is stopped, you can start the container using the Start button from the Docker Desktop, or you can run below from the command prompt:

docker start wlsnode01

You can also the container ID instead of the name if the name hasn’t been assigned. You can use below to identify the latest container ID:

docker ps -q -l

Then start using the container ID instead of the name:

docker start 7e97016c178f

But it’s easy to use the name so it’s a good idea to assign a container name when creating a new container using --name.

Use https://localhost:9002/console to launch WebLogic Admin Console. If you get a warning that’s due to the certificate and you need to click on “Accept the Risk and Continue” under “Advanced…” to continue.

You can login using the username and password from the domain.properties file to login.

That’s it!