Installing Oracle Instant Client and making it work with PHP

This is something that I wanted to post up for a while, because this is rather simple stuff and yet it took me a while to put this whole thing together for my own use/setup. It's also something that got some people interested and they asked me to post this up. So this post is for Maggie Nelson who is an active PHP and Oracle advocate.

These instructions are for Linux since this is what I use. I am also using Mandriva 2007.1 and will be using RPM packages where available and will mentioned some things specific to Mandriva.

Setup consists of two parts:
1. Installing Oracle Instant Client on Linux
2. Getting and compiling oci8 extension for PHP.

So let's begin.

Installing Oracle Instant Client on Linux:

1. Download the Oracle Instant Client for Linux rpms from http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/oci/instantclient/htdocs/linuxsoft.html. The files that I am using and that you will need are:

Code:

oracle-instantclient-sqlplus-10.2.0.3-1
oracle-instantclient-devel-10.2.0.3-1
oracle-instantclient-basic-10.2.0.3-1

2. Install those rpms to your linux system:

Code:

sudo rpm -ivh oracle-instantclient-*

NOTE: Here is where things get interesting. We need to prepare a couple of configuration files and you will need to become root in order to make those files usable on a global level.
3. You need to be root at this point:

Code:

sudo bash

4. Create /etc/oracle directory as this is where we will store Oracle configuration files.
5. You will also need to grab a copy of tnsnames.ora file either from your Oracle DBA or from another system.

Code:

copy tnsnames.ora /etc/oracle

6. Create a shell script that will initialize Oracle environment variables.

Code:

vi /etc/profile.d/oracle.sh

place the following into that file:

Code:

export TNS_ADMIN=/etc/oracle/
export SQLPATH=/usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.3/client/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.3/client/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=$PATH:$SQLPATH

7. This is pretty much it. When you logout and log back in you should confirm that your environment variables are there using

Code:

export

. Also try out sqlplus to make sure it works and can connect to your Oracle database.

Getting and compiling oci8 extension for PHP:
1. pear download pecl/oci8
2. tar -xzvf oci8-1.2.4.tgz
3. cd oci8-1.2.4
4. phpize (php4ize for php4 support, it seems Mandriva names these binaries differently for php4)
5. ./configure --with-oci8=instantclient,/usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.3/client/lib
6. make
7. sudo make install
Now become root user (sudo bash)
8. Create a file called /etc/php.d/999_oci.ini and place the following line there:

Code:

extension=oci8.so

9. vi /etc/sysconfig/http and add the following lines at the very end of the file

Code:

###
#
# Adding ORACLE Variables to the config status (cause during upgrade the httpd file got replaced :( )
#
export TNS_ADMIN=/etc/oracle
export NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.AL32UTF8

10. service httpd restart
11. And you are done. Pull up a page that calls phpinfo() and confirm that oci8 is loaded in apache and that the environment variables are setup properly. You can also do "php -m" to see of php cli loads the module as well.

I hope that this is very informative and that I didn't miss anything. If there's something that I missed or there's an error somewhere then please let me know and I will correct it.

UPDATE: Make sure you have php "dev" package installed so that you can compile PHP extension(s).
UPDATE 2: I have posted updated instructions regarding Oracle Instant Client 11g and building Pecl OCI8 with 1 line

Gena01

	Author	Topic: Installing Oracle Instant Client and making it work with PHP (Read 5780 times)
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