Using Oracle InstantClient 11g with PHP onto RHEL 5 with SELinux

This is an example of using the Oracle InstantClient 11g with PHP.

Installation InstantClient for PHP

This is based on work from the past – but I appeared to have done the following:

1. Installed InstantClient and Pear to manage the php installation.
   • sudo yum install php-pear
   • sudo rpm -ivh oracle-instantclient11.1-basic-11.1.0.7.0-1.i386.rpm
   • sudo rpm -Uvh oracle-instantclient11.1-devel-11.1.0.7.0-1.i386.rpm
2. Update the library cache to include oracle:
   • sudo vi /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle.conf 
   • This file just contains the line: 
     /usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib
3. Used pecl to install the OCI client into PHP:
   • sudo pecl install oci8
4. Updated PHP to then make use of the installed module
   • sudo vi /etc/php.d/oci8.ini
   • This file just contained
     ; Enable oci8 extension module
extension=oci8.so
5. I then restarted the web server.
   • sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart

Testing

You can then test this by creating a php file with the following content:

<?php      
$conn = oci_connect('[user]', '[password]', ' [//]host_name[:port][/service_name][:server_type][/instance_name]');       
$query = 'select table_name from user_tables';       
$stid = oci_parse($conn, $query);       
oci_execute($stid, OCI_DEFAULT);       
while ($row = oci_fetch_array($stid, OCI_ASSOC)) {       
  foreach ($row as $item) {       
    echo $item." ";       
  }       
  echo "&lt;br&gt;\n";       
}       
oci_free_statement($stid);       
oci_close($conn);       
?>

Then use a browser to get to this web page, and it should show you the content of user_tables.

Troubleshooting

Then, if SELinux its not turned off then the following is needed, (but we don’t want to do it this way as it’s painful and make SELinux a bit pointless):

sudo chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib/libnnz11.so'       
sudo chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib/libclntsh.so.11.1'       
sudo chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/lib/php/modules/oci8.so'       
sudo execstack -c /usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib/libclntsh.so       
sudo execstack -c /usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib/libclntsh.so.11.1       
sudo execstack -c /usr/lib/oracle/11.1/client/lib/libnnz11.so       
sudo chcon -u system_u '/usr/lib/php/modules/oci8.so'       
sudo execstack -s /usr/sbin/httpd       
sudo /usr/sbin/setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1