Fix ORDS issue: No pools configured yet

In a previous post, I blogged how I do my Oracle APEX upgrade, and part of that is to copy ORDS.

But when I tried to start ORDS, I got the “No pools configured yet” in my logs. 

ORDS was running, but APEX wasn’t accessible.

I spend my night looking at this, as I already had done so many ORDS installation and configurations, but still was puzzled with this… so thought to share the fix, even if it’s just so I can remember the next time it happens ;)

Background:

- My Oracle database is a CDB with multiple PDBs

- For every PDB I have a separate ORDS running in standalone

When doing an upgrade of APEX I do:

- Copy PDB called APEX_PDB to APEX[version]_PDB (e.g. APEX192_PDB)

For ORDS I did this:

- Copy directory ords to ords192

- In ords192, change ords.war to ords192.war, set the new path for the configdir and in the standalone directory change standalone.properties to serve a different port and path:

Doing the above, ORDS was running nicely but gave me the “No pools configured yet” error, which also means APEX wasn’t accessible.

If in my standalone.properties I wouldn’t change the path to /ords192 but keep /ords it worked just fine. But I didn’t want that, as I’m used to use /ords[apex_version]

So what finally worked for me, was the following:

- mv the ords directory to ords_old

- create a new directory ords and unpack the ORDS zip

- rename ords.war to ords192.war

- set the config dir of ords192.war

- run java -jar ords.war setup and follow the wizard

- run java -jar ords.war standalone and follow the wizard

- quit

- open the standalone.properties file and change the standalone.context.path=/ords to /ords192

- start ORDS again

To me, it seems a combination of renaming the war file first, setting config dir and make sure to change the standalone properties as the default in there is /ords