Installing Oracle OCI8 on a RedHat / Fedora Box

Posted by wtadmin on 09 Jun 2014 / 0 Comment

I’ve been working on a project that requires Oracle OCI8 installed on a development server running RedHat Linux.  Here are the steps I took to successfully install this library to be used with PHP/CodeIgniter.

Make sure to download the required libraries from the Oracle website:

Instant Client Downloads for Linux x86-64 (version 12.1.0.1.0 as of June 1, 2014):
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linuxx86-64soft-092277.html

  • Instant Client Package – Basic: All files required to run OCI, OCCI, and JDBC-OCI applications
  • Instant Client Package – SQL*Plus: Additional libraries and executable for running SQL*Plus with Instant Client
  • Instant Client Package – SDK: Additional header files and an example makefile for developing Oracle applications with Instant Client

Download / Unzip Steps (from Oracle):

  • Download the appropriate Instant Client packages for your platform (above). All installations REQUIRE the Basic package.
  • Unzip the packages into a single directory such as “instantclient”.
  • Set the library loading path in your environment to the directory in Step 2 (“instantclient”). On many UNIX platforms – in this case, RedHat Linux –  LD_LIBRARY_PATH is the appropriate environment variable.

Installing the RPM packages:rpm -ivh instantclient-basic-linux.XXX.rpm
rpm -ivh instantclient-sdk-linux.XXX.rpm

Make sure to install the pre-requisites:yum install php-pear
yum install php-devel

Download the OCI8 extension:pear download pecl/oci8
tar xvzf oci8-1.4.7.tgz
cd oci8-1.4.7/
phpize

Configure the extension with your Oracle client library path (change the path …/12.1/… with your own version):./configure --with-oci8=shared,instantclient,/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/lib/

Compile and install:make
make install

Configure SELinux: allows httpd to execute programs that require memory addresses that are both executable and writeablesetsebool -P httpd_execmem 1

Add the folowing configuration at the end of php.inivi /etc/php.ini[OCI8] extension=oci8.so

Restart Apacheservice httpd restart
or
sudo apachectl restart

Create a PHP test page (test.php), insert the following codes and load the page in the browser:

<?php phpinfo();?>

or directly from the command line:
php -r "phpinfo();"

You should see the OCI8 library installed successfully.
All done!