Installing python cx_oracle on Ubuntu

cx_oracle.md

First of all, it just seems like doing anything with Oracle is obnoxiously painful for no good reason. It's the nature of the beast I suppose. cx_oracle is a python module that allows you to connect to an Oracle Database and issue queries, inserts, updates..usual jazz.

Linux

Step 1:

sudo apt-get install build-essential unzip python-dev libaio-dev

Step 2. Click here to download the appropriate zip files required for this. You'll need:

• instantclient-basic-linux
• instantclient-sdk-linux

Get the appropriate version for your system.. x86 vs 64 etc. Make sure you don't get version 12, since it's not supported by the cx_Oracle moduel yet.

Unzip the content in the same location, so you'll end up with a folder named: instantclient_11_2 (in my case) which will contain a bunch of .so and jar files.

just for ease of use I'll use $ORACLE_HOME which will basically point to the location where you unzipped your installclient folders.

export ORACLE_HOME=$(pwd)/instantclient_11_2

Step 3. create a symlink to your SO file.

cd $ORACLE_HOME
ln -s libclntsh.so.11.1   libclntsh.so  #the version number on your .so file might be different

Step 4. Update your /etc/profile or your ~/.bashrc

export ORACLE_HOME=/location/of/your/files/instantclient_11_2
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME

Step 5: Edit /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle.conf

This is a new file, simple add the location of your .so files here, then update the ldpath using

sudo ldconfig

Step 6. Finaly just install cx_oracle module:

pip install cx_oracle

Mac OS X

Step 1:
install Homebower for the compilation tools

Step 2. Click here to download the appropriate zip files required for this. You'll need:

• instantclient-basic-macosx
• instantclient-sdk-macosx

Get the appropriate version for your system.. x32 vs x64 etc. Make sure you don't get version 12, since it's not supported by the cx_Oracle moduel yet.

Unzip the content in the same location, so you'll end up with a folder named: instantclient_11_2 (in my case) which will contain a bunch of .so and jar files.

just for ease of use I'll use $ORACLE_HOME which will basically point to the location where you unzipped your installclient folders.

export ORACLE_HOME=$(pwd)/instantclient_11_2

Step 3. create a symlink to your SO file.

cd $ORACLE_HOME
ln -s libclntsh.dylib.11.2 libclntsh.dylib  #the version number on your .so file might be different
ln -s libocci.dylib.11.2 libocci.dylib

Step 4. Update your /etc/profile or your ~/.bashrc

export ORACLE_HOME=/location/of/your/files/instantclient_11_2
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME

Step 5. Finaly just install cx_oracle module:

pip install cx_oracle

Collecting cx_oracle Downloading cx_Oracle-5.2.1.tar.gz (113kB) 100% |████████████████████████████████| 122kB 1.1MB/s Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info: Traceback (most recent call last): File "<string>", line 1, in <module> File "/tmp/pip-build-FRKMcN/cx-oracle/setup.py", line 170, in <module> raise DistutilsSetupError("cannot locate an Oracle software " \ distutils.errors.DistutilsSetupError: cannot locate an Oracle software installation
I am still getting this error after following the instructions to the letter. Is anyone else experiencing this? How did you fix it?

@bawboc Hi, if you are using "sudo" to install system wide, you should add the -E flag to preserve enviroment variables, eg. "sudo -E pip install cx_Oracle", had the same problem.

Thank you very much for this info!!!

Thanks so much for this guide! And thanks to @gchiappe for the very helpful comment.

thank you @kimus and also @gchiappe !!

In /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle.conf, do i have to only put paths of .so files or also the file with .so.11.1 extension.

This has been asked above, but "Step 5: Edit /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle.conf" isn't very clear. Do we put the path to the folder we extracted the files into, or the actual paths to the four .so files that are there?

@avandesa simply create that file, and just put the location where you installed the instant client oracle_home dir (that directory has all the .so files in it)
so it might be something like /home/me/oracle

If you are using ubuntu 20.04, do not necessarily need install the python-dev package, because python version 2 has already been deprecated. Continue with the rest of the settings for linux, which will work, and don't forget the detail said by colleague @cjpit.

I am getting below error while "pip install cx_oracle"

Downloading/unpacking cx-oracle
Cannot fetch index base URL https://pypi.python.org/simple/
Could not find any downloads that satisfy the requirement cx-oracle
Cleaning up...
No distributions at all found for cx-oracle
Storing debug log for failure in /home/emgda/.pip/pip.log

It appears you cannot now install cx-oracle via pip without allowing "insecure and unverifiable" files:

Can you please try:

$ pip install cx_oracle --allow-external cx_oracle --allow-unverified

Thanks