So I had been trying to get PHP on a Debian system to talk to our Oracle database for a while, and it had been nagging me for long enough that I decided to post my solution here.

A bit of context:

I needed to get connectivity to our Oracle database on a Debian Etch x86_64  
installation. Oracle provides the [Oracle Instant Client](http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/oci/instantclient/index.html) (OCI), for which  
PHP [has support](http://us2.php.net/oci8).  

The Debian packages for PHP however were not compiled with OCI support,  
but you can recompile your own and enable it:  

• get the current OCI release (the patch below assumes you grab 11.1 which is currently the latest)
• unzip to /usr/local/OCI (if you use a different location you'll have to change the patch accordingly)

• set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH to /usr/local/OCI

• create some symlinks. I'm not 100% sure this is needed but I suppose it doesn't hurt

libclntsh.so -> libclntsh.so.11.1
libocci.so -> libocci.so.11.1

• get the php5 package source: apt-get source php5

• install all dependent packages: apt-get build-dep php5 (the Debian Developer Reference is a very useful resource)

• apply this patch to your tree. this is the core piece. you may have to tweak it depending on OCI version and install location. basically passing --with-oci8 to apache2 module config and setting appropriate version numbers

• rebuild packages: dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
• TADA!

You will also need to add the LD_LIBRARYPATH to your /etc/init.d/apache2_ script so it finds the OCI libraries on startup.