title: How to set up OCI to connect to Oracle from PHP?
body: <p>On the latest Ubuntu, I have a functioning PHP 5.2.4 installation.  I want to use a remote Oracle server from PHP using OCI.</p>
  
  <p>I've downloaded the <em>"Instant Client Package - Basic Lite"</em> (<a href="http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/oci/instantclient/htdocs/linuxsoft.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Link</a>). I've unzipped the package containing the OCI libraries to a dir but I have no idea how to tell PHP that I want to use these libraries. Predictably, I get</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Fatal error: Call to undefined function oci_connect() in...</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>when running this code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?php 
     $conn = oci_connect('hr', 'hrpw', 'someremotehost');
  ?&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I don't want to recompile PHP with Oracle support.  What's the fastest way to wire up PHP so that I can use Oracle?  Do I need any other libaries, like the Oracle client if I want to connect to a remote Oracle instance?</p>