Oracle Cloud Projects Browser Extension

Navigating in the Oracle Cloud console to inspect and manipulate your OCI resources can be cumbersome. Where again are these resources? Which compartment, under which service? Resources that logically belong together because they make up an application or a connected chain cannot easily be grouped.

Introducing the Oracle Cloud Projects extension for Chromium browsers (such as Edge, Chrome, Brave). This is an extension that allows you to capture OCI resources, organize them in projects and nested projects, add notes to them and most important of all: support quick and direct navigation in the OCI Console. Let’s see the extension in action:

Demo of the Oracle Cloud Projects extension for Chromium browsers — for collecting, organizing and inspecting OCI Resources

The animated gif shows a browser logged in to Oracle Cloud. The extension is opened in the side panel. It contains projects organized in a tree. Each project contains OCI resources. A resource can be selected in the tree. Its details are presented, along with a hyperlink for direct navigation in the OCI Console to the resource. (double clicking the node in the tree will also cause navigation of the browser to the resource).

OCI Resources can be added to a project or as child to another resource using the context menu in the OCI Console, as is shown in the next image.

Add an OCI resource to the OCI Projects collection using the context menu option “Add OCI Details to OCI Projects extension”

The OCI Projects side panel has a few more options:

• add projects and nested (child) projects
• drag and projects and resources to reorganize
• delete projects and resources (well: the links to resources, not the actual OCI resources of course)
• add notes to projects and OCI resources
• edit properties for projects and resources
• remember projects and resources across browser sessions (using browser local storage)

Some features of the OCI Projects extension for organizing and editing projects and resources

I will soon publish an article that describes in details how the extension is implemented. You can find the source code on GitHub: https://github.com/lucasjellema/oci-projects-extension

To install this extension, these are the steps:

1. Clone the GitHub repository — which will bring the source to your local machine. You may want to inspect the code to make the extension does nothing ontoward with your OCI data. I promise — it does not.
2. Open your Chromium browser — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave Browser
3. Open the Manage Extensions page in the browser

4. Make sure the Developer Mode is activated

Enable Developer Mode in order to allow the browser to load extensions from the local file system

5. Click on the button Load Unpacked

Click on Load Unpacked

Select the directory on your local file system that contains the file manifest.json, part of the cloned repository

Select the folder that contans the manifest.json file — the extension’s configuration file

The OCI Projects extension is added to the browser. It is active. You can inspect its permissons and others settings.

The extension should be loaded into your browser and it should be added to the list of extensions

6. You can now open the extension’s side panel page from the Manage Extensions

Open the extension’s side panel starting from the Manage Extensions icon

You can pin the extension to make it readily accessible.

Conclusion

Here you have a convenient way of organizing the OCI resources you frequently have to deal with in the OCI Console. This extension is easy to use and offers straightforward value.

If you have suggestions for the extension or want to contribute, please do so through the GitHub repo (issues and especially PRs). Feel free to clone and fork and do with it whatever you like. It is an early version and it could easily be enhanced in many ways. Such as adding more properties for the OCI Resources, adding child nodes and references automatically, keeping track of history, providing search across all resources, identifying compartment and region and more.