I found this arti­cle while Googling around for a way to make Win­dows XP, Xampp, PHP and Ora­cle 10g work together. It cov­ers every­thing pretty well, but I just want to add a few notes to bring the arti­cle up to date.

1. Your “php.ini” file will be found in your Xampp folder. If your setup is like mine, the path to the file is: C:\xampp\apache\bin\php.ini
2. At the time of this writ­ing, Xampp is shipped with PHP 5.2.6, and comes with a few very use­ful exten­sions that are, by default, deac­ti­vated. To make 10g work with Xampp, all you need to do is uncom­ment the fol­low­ing line by remov­ing the “;” at the begin­ning of it

   ;extension=php_oci8.dll

   But to put your setup to bet­ter use, I rec­om­mend you also free up a few more extensions:

   • Read up on PDO. If you don’t think it’s use­ful, then, by all means, leave these lines com­mented out.

     extension=php_pdo_oci.dll
     extension=php_pdo_oci8.dll
     extension=php_pdo_odbc.dll
     extension=php_pdo_sqlite.dll

   • Check out Xde­bug if you haven’t already. See my note about PDO.

     extension=php_xdebug.dll

   • I per­son­ally find SplFile­Info to be a pretty use­ful class. You may disagree.

     extension=php_fileinfo.dll

3. In case you couldn’t tell, the test code pro­vided in that arti­cle is spe­cific to that author’s local envi­ron­ment. To make sure the ora­cle exten­sion has been loaded, do the following:

   if (!function_exists('oci_connect')) {
   die('No dice, homes. You screwed something up.');
   }
   echo 'It works!!!';

   Throw in your php tags and save that to a file called “oracle.php” (or what­ever you like) in your web doc­u­ment root, and open it up in a browser.

That’s all. Make sure this is only done in your local test­ing envi­ron­ment and not on any pro­duc­tion box. Now get codin’.