How to change apex_public_user password in ORDS

When you install Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) as the gateway for your Oracle Application Express (APEX) applications, you run the java -jar ords.war command to configure ORDS, including specifying connection strings and passwords for the service accounts apex_public_user, apex_listener and apex_rest_public_user.

The first time you run this command, you get asked where to store the configuration. A file called defaults.xml gets created in the folder you specify. It looks like this:

There's also a subfolder called conf, which contains a configuration file for each of the three service accounts mentioned above. The one for apex_public_user is called conf/apex.xml and it looks like this:

You can change any of these settings by modifying the config file (remember to restart the web server, ie Tomcat, after you have saved the changes).

But what if you need to change the database password? As can be seen from the screenshot, the password value is encrypted, so you cannot simply modify this value directly. What do you do then? You need to re-run the ORDS config with the setup flag:

# to change the database connection config in ORDS:
su - root
# assuming this is where your ORDS config file is located
cd /u01/ords
# re-run the ORDS config
java -jar ords.war setup
# for an existing setup, should get message "INFO: Using configuration folder: /u01/ords/config/ords"
# follow the prompts to specify the database host, port, sid, and passwords
# should get confirmation "INFO: Updated configurations: apex, apex_al, apex_rt"
# now restart the web server to pick up changes
sudo service tomcat restart

That's all there is to it... simple when you know how! :-)

UPDATE: Kris Rice pointed out that you can also edit the password directly in the config file by placing an exclamation mark before the password, for example "!your_password" (without the quotes). When you restart Tomcat, ORDS will update the config file with an encrypted version of the password.