PHP and oci8 on Ubuntu

OCI8 is an extension for providing APIs to Oracle database management system. However, installing OCI8 is not just easy like apt-get since it requires SDK offered by Oracle and its distribution license prohibits the inclusion to linux distribution. That means we have to download and compile it by ourselves. Fortunately, it is a little bit easy for Ubuntu.

1. Install PEAR and PECL
   

   sudo apt-get install php-pear
   

2. Download Oracle Instant Client. You need at least Basic and SDK.
   

3. Extract the archives.
   

   sudo mkdir -p /opt/oracle
   cd /opt/oracle
   sudo unzip instantclient-basic-linux-x86-64-10.2.0.3-20070103.zip
   sudo unzip instantclient-sdk-linux-x86-64-10.2.0.3-20070103.zip
   sudo mv /opt/oracle/instantclient_10_2 /opt/oracle/instantclient
   

4. Create symbolic links.
   

   cd /opt/oracle/instantclient
   sudo ln -s libclntsh.so.10.1 libclntsh.so
   sudo ln -s libocci.so.10.1 libocci.so
   

5. Add instant client to system ld.
   

   sudo su -
   echo /opt/oracle/instantclient > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle-instantclient
   

6. Compile oci8.
   

   sudo pecl install oci8
   

7. Enter instantclient,/opt/oracle/instantclient when you are prompted.
   

8. Enable the extension.
   

   sudo su -
   echo extension=oci8.so >> /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
   

9. Restart apache2.
   

   sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart