Re:morse.nl

Oracle can be a real pain to get installed on your server, however, since they’ve created a Debian (Sarge and later) repository it is a lot easier. Getting it to work with PHP (in this case version 5) will be another story which this small how-to will describe.

First, add the Debian repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list by adding the following two lines at the bottom of the file;

# Oracle XE
deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free

Afterwards run the following chain of commands as root;

wget http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle -O- | apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get install oracle-xe

Now Oracle is installed on your system and it will ask you to run /etc/init.d/oracle configure first.
Since this was the easy part let’s continue to the hard part; enabling Oracle in PHP. (continue reading…)

If you’re doing something with webservices and PHP, you’ll most likely use the NuSOAP library. However this may be a problem when you’ve upgraded your PHP installation to version 5 or better. Since this version PHP has a built in soap client which uses the same name as the NuSOAP class, you can still use NuSOAP but you need to make two changes, namely rename the class “soapclient” and its constructor to, for example, “soap_client”. Remember to fix this in all your other code too!