Jelly and Custard

Running Oracle 10g XE & PHP on Linux

November 15th, 2005

I decided to reformat my local webserver the other day. This server generally runs all my code on it before its published onto the web. I was using Fedora Core 4 Test 3, but decided to lose some stuff I've installed on there, and put a full release of FC4 on.

I settled on the following LAMP options:

• Apache 2.0.55
• PHP 5.0.5
• MySQL 5.0.15

I decided that I'd stick Oracle XE on as well, and have a play with that. Surely if MySQL is that simple to install then Oracle can't be that much harder! Or so I thought...

Heading over to the Oracle XE home page allows you to download the Oracle DB System. Here's what I did from then on to get this baby installed:

1. Installing Oracle
   I grabbed the RPM version, weighing in at a hefty 200Mb, and installed it.

   rpm -ivh oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-0.1.i386.rpm

   At this point, it was kindly noted out that I needed the libaio libraries as well:

   yum install libaio

   will sort out that dependancy. If you don't have yum installed and configured, then you can install the RPM directly.Re-run the RPM installation line, and follow the onscreen instructions.

2. Following the Getting Started Guide assumes you are installing on either Windows, or using a GUI such as KDE on Linux. If you are installing remotely as I was, then ignore the first step of that guide, and instead point your web browser to http://Your_Server:8080/htmldb. Make sure that you have opened port 8080 on your server's firewall (You do have a firewall running don't you?!)

   You should get a nice login screen where you can continue the Getting Started Guide

3. Compiling Oracle Support into PHP
   Next step you need to take is to compile the Oracle extension into PHP. Grab the latest source for PHP and start the installation:
   tar -zxf php-5.0.5.tar.gz
cd php-5.0.5
./configure
--with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs
--with-oci8=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server
--with-oci8-instant-client=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/

   Of course, add other modules as you see fit. Once the configure routine has completed, its time to make and install. Note that you may need to copy php.ini into /etc as well:
   make
make install
cp php.ini-dist /etc/

   You'll also need to add the PHP Handlers to your apache configuration file httpd.conf:
   AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

   Restart Apache and test if Oracle support is working by creating a phpinfo page and verifying the contents under the oci8 heading:
   

   PLAIN TEXT
   PHP:
   

   1. phpinfo();

   

4. Environment Variables
   The next step to getting Oracle working is to setup the environment variables. The quickest way to do this is to edit your rc.local file to add these in before starting apache. Adding these to the Apache httpd.conf file using SetEnv didn't work, and other users have reported similar problems. Here's what I'm using in my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file
   ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/
ORACLE_SID=XE
export ORACLE_HOME ORACLE_SID
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${ORACLE_HOME}/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
/usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl start

   This will make sure that your environment variables are setup before starting apache - this is essential, else apache won't pick them up. (Make sure you set your path to apachectl correctly).

   This does however have one assumption. That is, that apache wasn't installed via RPM, but instead from source. Installing from RPM tends to stick httpd in the chkconfig to run at levels 3, 4, and 5. You could simply remove this:
   chkconfig --level 345 httpd off

   or simply add
   service httpd stop

   before the Oracle information for rc.local.

5. Testing it out
   The final step is to test it out. If you have completed the getting started guide, then you would have unlocked the HR user, which we'll use to login and grab some data:
   PLAIN TEXT
   PHP:
   

   1. $conn = OCILogon('hr', 'hr', 'XE');
   2. $sql = "SELECT * FROM employees where rownum<=5"; //limits to 5 rows
   3.  
   4. $result = oci_parse($conn, $sql);
   5.  
   6. oci_execute($result);
   7.  
   8. echo '<pre>';
   9. while ( $row = oci_fetch_assoc($result) ) {
   10.   print_r($row);
   11. }
   12. echo '</pre>';

   This should give you a printout of 5 employees from that table.

6. Congratulations, you've managed to install Oracle support for PHP.

Some other useful links:

• Installing Oracle XE & PHP on Windows
• PHP Oracle Functions

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Entry Filed under: PHP