Adding Oracle Support PHP On Ubuntu Xenial

2017-04-24

I’ve been recently asked to enable a web server running to PHP to connect to an Oracle database for a client. Sadly this doesn’t work natively on FreeBSD so I’m documenting how I managed to do it on Ubuntu Xenial. This was inspired by this post and this post .

Update System:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install zip
reboot

Download Instant Client drivers:

Download the files below from Oracle

instantclient-basic-linuxAMD64-10.1.0.5.0-20060519.zip
instantclient-sdk-linuxAMD64-10.1.0.5.0-20060519.zip
instantclient-sqlplus-linuxAMD64-10.1.0.5.0-20060519.zip

Prepare installation location:

Create the folder as below and upload the Instant Client files to that location

mkdir /opt/oracle

Extract files:

cd /opt/oracle
unzip instantclient-basic-linuxAMD64-10.1.0.5.0-20060519.zip
unzip instantclient-sdk-linuxAMD64-10.1.0.5.0-20060519.zip
unzip instantclient-sqlplus-linuxAMD64-10.1.0.5.0-20060519.zip
mv instantclient10_1 instantclient

Update ldconfig:

Create symlinks to the so files

cd instantclient
ln -s libclntsh.so.10.1 libclntsh.so
ln -s libocci.so.10.1 libocci.so

Run ldconfig

echo /opt/oracle/instantclient > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle-instantclient.conf
ldconfig -v

Prepare and test connectivity:

Add the following to the end of .bashrc

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/oracle/instantclient
export ORACLE_HOME="/opt/oracle/instantclient"
export OCI_LIB="/opt/oracle/instantclient"
export TNS_ADMIN="/opt/oracle/instantclient/network/admin"

Reload .bashrc:

source ~/.bashrc

Create the tnsnames.ora file

mkdir -p /opt/oracle/instantclient/network/admin

Contents:

# /opt/oracle/instantclient/network/admin/tnsnames.ora
MYDATABASE=
 (description=
   (address_list=
     (address = (protocol = TCP)(host = IPADDRESS)(port = PORT))
   )
 (connect_data =
   (service_name=DATABASESID)
 )
)

Test:

sqlplus USER/PASSDWORD@MYDATABASE

This is what you should see if everything was successful:

SQL*Plus: Release 10.1.0.5.0 - Production on Mon Apr 24 05:05:49 2017

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

SQL>

Install the required packages to compile OCI8:

apt-get install php-pear php-dev build-essential libaio1

Install OCI8 through pecl

pecl install oci8

Answer with the following:

Client [autodetect] : instantclient,/opt/oracle/instantclient

Add to the available PHP modules

echo extension=oci8.so > /etc/php/7.0/mods-available/oci8.ini

Enable the extension (Here we will do it for CLI)

ln -s /etc/php/7.0/mods-available/oci8.ini /etc/php/7.0/cli/conf.d/

Check if the module was indeed enabled

php -m
[PHP Modules]
calendar
Core
ctype
date
dom
exif
fileinfo
filter
ftp
gettext
hash
iconv
json
libxml
oci8
openssl
pcntl
pcre
PDO
Phar
posix
readline
Reflection
session
shmop
SimpleXML
sockets
SPL
standard
sysvmsg
sysvsem
sysvshm
tokenizer
wddx
xml
xmlreader
xmlwriter
xsl
Zend OPcache
zlib

[Zend Modules]
Zend OPcache

Congratulations. You are now done :)

About Me

Dev gone Ops gone DevOps. Any views expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.