Concerning MSSQL

For a long time, this guide presented the creation of php5-mssql packages. This was not required. The fact is that MSSQL functions are provided by the php5-sybase package. To use MSSQL, you just need to install this package :

/usr/bin/apt-get install php5-sybase

Note : In case you use the Symfony framework, you need to disable the automatic date conversion :

/bin/sed -i -e 's/^.*\(mssql\.datetimeconvert\).*/\1 = Off/' /etc/php5/*/php.ini

Building

Installing OCI packages

/bin/echo "# Oracle repositories for debian unstable
deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free" \
     | /usr/bin/tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/unstable-oracle.list

We download the key signing this repository :

/usr/bin/wget http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle  -O- |  /usr/bin/apt-key add -

We update the available packages list :

/usr/bin/apt-get update

And we install the Oracle software needed to build php5-oci8 :

/usr/bin/apt-get install oracle-xe-client

Installing dependencies

First, we install packages needed to build PHP5 :

/usr/bin/apt-get build-dep php5

We install the fakeroot tool that allow to build PHP5 packages without being root :

/usr/bin/apt-get install fakeroot

We download PHP5 sources :

/bin/mkdir ~/SOURCES
cd ~/SOURCES
/usr/bin/apt-get source php5

We change directory to the root of PHP 5 sources :

cd ~/SOURCES/php5-*

Patching the sources for php5-oci8

We detect the path to the Oracle client:

ORACLE_CLIENT=$(find /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/ -name 'client' | sort --reverse | head --lines=1)

We edit the modulelist file :

/bin/echo "oci8 OCI8" | /usr/bin/tee -a debian/modulelist

/bin/echo ${ORACLE_CLIENT} | /bin/sed -e 's|/|\\/|g' | \
    /usr/bin/xargs -iCLIENT /bin/sed -i -e '/--with-mysql=shared,\/usr/i\
\t\t--with-oci8=shared,CLIENT \\' debian/rules

We edit the control file :

/bin/echo "Package: php5-oci8
Architecture: any
Depends: \${shlibs:Depends}, \${misc:Depends}, \${php:Depends}, php5-common (= \${Source-Version}), oracle-xe-client
Description: OCI8 module for php5
 This package provides a module for OCI8 using Oracle 10g Express client.
 .
 PHP5 is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is borrowed
 from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown
 in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write
 dynamically generated pages quickly.
" | /usr/bin/tee -a debian/control

We add the build dependencies to the control file :

/bin/sed -i -e 's/\(Build-Depends: .*\)/\1, oracle-xe-client/' debian/control

We create the configuration needed by dpkg-shlibdeps to work propely:

/bin/echo "libclntsh 10.1 oracle-xe-client(>= 10.2.0.1-1.2)" \
    | /usr/bin/tee -a debian/shlibs.local

Building the patched sources

Now, we can build our PHP 5 packages :

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${ORACLE_CLIENT}/lib" \
    /usr/bin/dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

If everything went well, you now have a package for and OCI8 PHP 5 extension. Since it can be used with the standard Debian PHP5, you can install it with :

cd ..
/usr/bin/dpkg -i ~/SOURCES/php5-oci8*.deb

Don't forget to restart your HTTP server. For example :

/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Configuring OCI8

You now need to configure the OCI8 module, and the Oracle client.

We detect the path of the Oracle client :

ORACLE_CLIENT=$(find /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/ -name 'client' | sort --reverse | head --lines=1)

We tell our system where to find the Oracle client and its configuration files. In order to do this, we need to modify /etc/environment :

/bin/echo ${ORACLE_CLIENT} | \
/usr/bin/xargs -iCLIENT sudo sh -c "echo 'ORACLE_HOME=CLIENT
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=CLIENT/lib
TNS_ADMIN=/etc/oracle
NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8' \
    | /usr/bin/tee -a /etc/environment"

Note : You can modify this command line to fit your needs if the NLS_LANG configuration does not fit you.

In the same file, we change the PATH so that it contain de binaries files for Oracle client :

/bin/echo "${ORACLE_CLIENT}/bin" | /bin/sed -e 's|/|\\\\/|g' | \
     /usr/bin/xargs -iCLIENT /bin/sed -i -e 's/PATH="\(.*\)"/PATH="\1:CLIENT"/' /etc/environment

Then, we do the same change to the users PATH :

echo "PATH=\$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin" | /usr/bin/tee -a /etc/profile

After this, we reload the configuration we just changed (Thank you Renaud):

source /etc/environment

You also need to configure Apache 2 (if it is the HTTP server you use) :

/bin/echo ${ORACLE_CLIENT} | \
xargs -iCLIENT sudo sh -c "echo 'export ORACLE_HOME=CLIENT
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=\$ORACLE_HOME/lib:\$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export TNS_ADMIN=/etc/oracle
export NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8' \
    | /usr/bin/tee -a /etc/apache2/envvars"

We create the Oracle client configuration folder :

/bin/mkdir /etc/oracle

We configure our database connection parameters :

ORA_HOST=oracle-server-name
ORA_PORT=1521
ORA_DB=DATABASE_NAME

And we create the configuration file for the Oracle client :

/bin/echo "$ORA_DB = (DESCRIPTION =
                (ADDRESS_LIST = (
                        ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = $ORA_HOST)(PORT = $ORA_PORT)
                ))
                (CONNECT_DATA = (SERVICE_NAME = $ORA_DB))
        )" | /usr/bin/tee -a /etc/oracle/tnsnames.ora

Note: You can use the two last commands as many time you want if you have to connect to more than one database or server.

If everything went well, you can now use Oracle clients (sqlplus for example) and the php5-oci8 extension.

Thanks

• Thanks to Oracle for the OCI8 packages and the article Installing Oracle Database XE on Debian, Ubuntu and Kubuntu.