Oracle Instant Client on OS X Revision as of Monday, 21 December 2015 at 07:36 UTC

• Head to the download page.
  Login required.

• Download these files:

    instantclient-basic-macos.x64-11.2.0.3.0.zip  
    instantclient-sdk-macos.x64-11.2.0.3.0.zip  
    instantclient-sqlplus-macos.x64-11.2.0.3.0.zip  
    instantclient-jdbc-macos.x64-11.2.0.3.0.zip
  

• Make sure that you get the 64-bit versions (for 64-bit Pythons),
  else you’ll see something like this at import

    ImportError: dlopen(/Users/nikhil/.pyenv/versions/manifold-api/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cx_Oracle.so, 2): Symbol not found: _OCIAttrGet  
      Referenced from: /Users/nikhil/.pyenv/versions/manifold-api/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cx_Oracle.so  
      Expected in: flat namespace
  

• Extract them at the command line. You’ll get a folder called
  “instantclient\_11\_2”

• Move it to /usr/local

    sudo mkdir /usr/local/oracle  
    sudo mv instantclient_11_2 /usr/local/oracle/instantclient  
    sudo chown user:group /usr/local/oracle
  

• Set some environment variables

    export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/local/oracle/instantclient  
    export OCI_HOME=$ORACLE_HOME  
    export OCI_LIB_DIR=$OCI_HOME  
    export OCI_INCLUDE_DIR=$OCI_HOME/sdk/include  
    export NLS_LANG=AMERICAN_AMERICA.UTF8  
    export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$OCI_LIB_DIR
  

• Last steps

    cd $OCI_LIB_DIR  
    ln -s libclntsh.dylib.11.1 libclntsh.dylib  
    ln -s libocci.dylib.11.1 libocci.dylib
  

Other Notes

• Had to copy tnsnames.ora to /etc for things to work properly.