On the Oracle and PHP blog today Christopher Jones has posted a tutorial showing you how to install Oracle support in PHP on a XAMPP setup. Oracle support requires the installation of the OCI8 PHP extension.

This post shows how to install XAMPP on Windows to run PHP applications that connect to a remote Oracle Database.

XAMPP is an open source package that contains Apache, PHP and many PHP 'extensions'. One of these extension is PHP OCI8 which connects to Oracle Database.

The post walks you through each of the steps required to get the combination up and running:

• Downloading and installing XAMPP
• Ensuring thread safety is enabled
• Editing the php.ini to enable the OCI8 module
• Installing the Oracle Instant Client

The post also includes some example code you can use to ensure the connection is up and working, selecting information from the default database.