Oracle Instant Client on OS XRevisionas of Monday, 21 December 2015 at 02:30 UTC

Needed this for Node.js.

   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.