I’m becoming a fan of Adminer, a database management tool written in PHP, with lots of features and consisting only of a single PHP file, and very easy to deploy to an Apache web server. I have started to develop a plugin adminer-plugin-dump-markdown so I can quickly convert queries and tables to Markdown format, ready to be included in my e-mails or in my blog posts.

I wanted to connect to an Oracle database, but I got the following message error:

No extension

None of the supported PHP extensions (OCI8, PDO_OCI) are available.

I quicly checked my server and the oci8.so library wasn’t available:

find / -name oci8.so 2>&1 | grep -v "Permission denied"

so here’s how I proceeded:

1. download oracle instant client RPMs (Basic + Devel) from the Oracle website, and installation using yum install instant-client-etc.ect.rpm;
2. make sure that pecl tool is installed (if not yum install php-pear). Pecl can manage PHP extensions from a public repository;
3. install the oci8 extension with pecl install oci8 (for PHP7, for older PHP need to specify oci8 version);
4. add the extension=oci8.so row to the php.ini configuration file on the [PHP] section.

Once the webserver is restarted, I can access an Oracle instance. I can use a service string like this:

(DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = host)(PORT = 1521))) (CONNECT_DATA = (SERVICE_NAME = service)))

without having to set the connection on the tnsnames.ora file. Adminer works great also on Oracle databases!