Enabling Oracle Instant Client on Plesk

[orware]

I have a book here about PHP Oracle Web Development and it has some instructions for installing Oracle's Instant Client on a Linux Machine (to enable Oracle database support for PHP) and it gives me the following instructions:

First I would download a copy of the Oracle Instant Client, in our case we would need the 64-bit linux version:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/softwa ... 4soft.html
(the main page for the download is the link below):
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/o ... index.html

Then it says unzip the package into a single directory in your file system (no problem).

Next it asks me to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the directory in which you unzipped the libraries (this is unfamiliar to me, but I think a simple Google search would clear things up for me).

After doing this it now says that I should run configure with Apache2 and OCI8 support using the following command:
# cd php-5xx
# ./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs \ --with-config-file-path=$HOME/apache/conf \ --with-oci8-instant-client=/home/instantclient10_2 \ --enable-sigchild
(the above command would definitely be different on a Plesk-based machine and the location where I unzipped the files into, but I am not quite sure if I can simply run that configuration option in Plesk and have it work).

Then the procedure says to run make, and then make install and restart Apache.

Now the procedure does not seem very difficult but adding Plesk into the mix adds a bit of uncertainty into things for me as I really do not want to mess up the way Plesk handles things, so I wanted to ask if somebody either knew the correct procedure for doing this or if perhaps there was script available that makes it very easy to do (much like the other one's ART has available for other PHP extensions.

From what I've read the Oracle Instant Client has a pretty liberal distribution license so I can't imagine why there wouldn't be at least a few repositories available that provided install scripts.

It'd be a very useful feature for colleges using Plesk (like ours) since Oracle databases are our primary data storage.

Thank you for your help!

[scott]

I used to distribute it, but no. Its not that liberal, their lawyers came after me.

[orware]

In my book here it says that Oracle Instant Client "comes with a free license for both development and production environments" but I guess it might be different if you're actually distributing the files, rather than directly downloading from Oracle?

Thanks for the reply though, since I was pretty curious about that, however I still don't know how the procedure I previously described for installing the Oracle Instant Client on an Apache server would be changed on a Plesk-based server.

Are there any special caveats I would have to consider to install this on our Plesk server?

Luckily you've done this before, and are pretty intimate with the Plesk internals so you're input is most welcome.

Thanks Scott,

[scott]

If you run across any documentation for how to implement it on Fedora 6 or above, or CentOS/RHEL 5 the steps would be identical. Its been years since I last did it, and back then I was using the older more monolithic way to do it as you can see in this .spec:

http://3es.atomicrocketturtle.com/packa ... p-5.0.spec

I dont think its necessary to rebuild all of php to do it. Second observation, you're using the wrong apxs. Thats the plesk one, you want the normal one (yum install httpd-devel).

[Jewel1000]

Dear,
I need to enabling oracle Instant client on Plesk(windows setup). please help

[scott]

In PHP I assume?