Connecting VBCS to ORDS with self-signed certificates for Development... https://blogs.oracle.com/vbcs/connecting-vbcs-to-ords-with-self-signed-c...

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January 8, 2019

Connecting VBCS to ORDS

with self-signed certificates for
Development
Aparna Gaonkar
PRODUCT MANAGER

From Visual Builder 18.4.1 onwards, there is a facility

for uploading trusted SSL certificates including self-
signed certificates, which is normally needed during

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Connecting VBCS to ORDS with self-signed certificates for Development... https://blogs.oracle.com/vbcs/connecting-vbcs-to-ords-with-self-signed-c...

development.

We have had a number of customers asking about

how to use a self-signed certificate to connect to
ORDS (Oracle Rest Data Services), which is a tool to
create REST interfaces on top of relational data.

ORDS exposes its REST APIs over an IP address,

and when ORDS is installed, it simply creates a self-
signed certificate for localhost. This will not be
trusted by Visual Builder when one tries to build a
Service Connection to an ORDS API. You might get
an error like the one below:

If you have an ORDS URL like https://<IPAddress>

/ords/pdb1/myworkspace/myhandler
/my_ords_service, and are looking for a quick way to
use the Service in VBCS with a self-signed certificate,
here are steps that you might find handy. However a
bit of caution - these steps involve self-signed

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Connecting VBCS to ORDS with self-signed certificates for Development... https://blogs.oracle.com/vbcs/connecting-vbcs-to-ords-with-self-signed-c...

certificates in VB and only should be used in case

of development not production!

Step 1 – Get the hostname for ORDS

First find the ‘proper’ hostname for your ORDS IP

address using the below:

nslookup <ip address>

This will give you the proper hostname to use for your
service connections. So instead of https://<IP
address> use https://<hostname>

Step 2 – Generate a self-signed certificate

Create a self-signed certificate with openssl utility the

above hostname as the CName and modify other
attributes according to your need

For e.g.

openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096

-keyout key.pem -out cert.pem -days 365
-subj '/CN=<hostname>'

This will yield two files key.pem and cert.pem

Convert the key.pem to its der file as below:

openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -inform PEM -outform

DER -in key.pem -out key.der -nocrypt

Similarly convert cert.pem to its crt file

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Connecting VBCS to ORDS with self-signed certificates for Development... https://blogs.oracle.com/vbcs/connecting-vbcs-to-ords-with-self-signed-c...

openssl x509 -outform der -in cert.pem

-out cert.crt

Once you have these two, they need to be updated in

the ORDS standalone.properties (More details can be
found in the ORDS documentation)

ssl.cert=/u01/app/oracle/product
/ords/cert.crt

ssl.cert.key=/u01/app/oracle/product
/ords/key.der

ssl.host=<hostname>

Restart the ORDS server after making these

changes.

Step 3 – Upload the self-signed certificate to VB

Go to Visual Builder -> Certificates (You require

administrator privileges to do this). Upload the
cert.pem (or cert.crt) giving some alias.

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Connecting VBCS to ORDS with self-signed certificates for Development... https://blogs.oracle.com/vbcs/connecting-vbcs-to-ords-with-self-signed-c...

Step 4 – Create the Service Connection

Create the service connection in Visual Builder for the

ORDS endpoint as you would create normally by
using "Define by Endpoint" flow but remember to give
the URL with the hostname instead of the IP address
i.e. https://<hostname>/ords/pdb1/myworkspace
/myhandler/my_ords_service. (A detailed tutorial for
creating and consuming Service Connections is
available here)

The Service Connection should now work. Do

remember that we have made Visual Builder trust all
requests signed via this certificate, so it is imperative
to keep this key secure, and as a best practice, never
use self-signed certificates in production.

EDIT : Corrected the command to convert to key.der

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Connecting VBCS to ORDS with self-signed certificates for Development... https://blogs.oracle.com/vbcs/connecting-vbcs-to-ords-with-self-signed-c...

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