Today, the Oracle Container Registry went live. A year in the making, the Registry is a means to provide Oracle customers with easy access to Oracle Database and Middleware Docker images to run On-Premise or on the Cloud.

Running official Oracle Database and Middleware containers previously required the building of images from scratch which was quite an arduous process that's now reduced to what is essentially a three step process after an initial registration at


There was a couple of gotchas that had me thinking something was broken so I figured I would share that and if it saves just one person from wasting time, I'm happy :)

  • Gotcha #1: Sadly, you need to be in USA, UK or Australia. I assume other restrictions will be lifted soon.

  • Gotcha #2: You can't download the image until you accept the terms on the website - it's a separate process I describe in Step 2 below.

How to download images from Oracle Container Registry

Step 1: docker login

Enter the username and password for Oracle Container Registry

Step 2: Ensure the Oracle Standard Terms and Restrictions is accepted at This will expire after 8 hours. If this step is missed docker pull and docker run from will fail with an unhelpful Error: image not found. It's there mate but you haven't pressed the magic accept button!

Step 3: Now we can download and start our WebLogic 12.2.1 instance in a single command.

docker run -d -p 7001:7001 --name wls1211

For security, the instance will be booted with a randomly generated password. As an administrator you can access the password by executing the following where wls1211 is the Container Name / ID of your instance.

docker logs wls1211 | grep password

Happy shipping!