cx_Oracle install on MacOS

foo.md

1. Download Instant Client:

• instantclient-basic-macos.x64-11.2.0.4.0.zip
• instantclient-sdk-macos.x64-11.2.0.4.0.zip
• instantclient-sqlplus-macos.x64-11.2.0.4.0.zip

2. Unzip and move to /opt

3. Create symlink

    $ cd /opt/instantclient_11_2/
    $ ln -s libclntsh.dylib.11.1 libclntsh.dylib
   

4. [ This step might not be needed ]

   Copy files:

    sudo cp /opt/instantclient_11_2/sdk/include/*.h /usr/include/
    sudo cp /opt/instantclient_11_2/*.dylib /usr/lib
    sudo cp /opt/instantclient_11_2/sqlplus /usr/bin
   

5. Run pip install. If it needs root permission, su to root first. Make sure you do this rather than sudo because you need to set the environment variable in the correct shell

    export ORACLE_HOME=/opt/instantclient_11_2
    pip install cx_Oracle
   

6. Test:

    Python 2.7.6 (default, Sep  9 2014, 15:04:36)
    [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 6.0 (clang-600.0.39)] on darwin
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> import cx_Oracle
    >>> conn_str = u'USER/PASSWORD@host.foo.com:1521/orcl'
    >>> conn = cx_Oracle.connect(conn_str)
    >>> c = conn.cursor()
    >>> c.execute(u'select sysdate from dual')
    <cx_Oracle.Cursor on <cx_Oracle.Connection to USER/PASSWORD@host.foo.com:1521/orcl>>
    >>> for row in c:
    ...     print row
    ...
    (datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 19, 15, 56, 5),)
    >>>
   

If you get this:

Python 2.7.6 (default, Sep  9 2014, 15:04:36)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 6.0 (clang-600.0.39)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import cx_Oracle
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: dlopen(/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/cx_Oracle.so, 2): Library not loaded: /ade/b/3071542110/oracle/rdbms/lib/libclntsh.dylib.11.1
  Referenced from: /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/cx_Oracle.so
  Reason: image not found

Then make sure you've set DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH correctly:

export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/instantclient_11_2/

In macOS mojave, it's not possible to copy under /usr/lib.
Instead i copied *. dylib files under /usr/local/lib.
And it works!

I'm using macOS mojave too. Copy *. dylib files under /usr/local/lib worked for me. Thanks! @EnesKorukcu

I think I botched my installation some how, however I figured out a work around.

when I was done following these instructions and even other tutorials I found online I kept getting this error:

conn = cx_Oracle.connect(conn_str)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
cx_Oracle.DatabaseError: DPI-1047: 64-bit Oracle Client library cannot be loaded: "dlopen(libclntsh.dylib, 1): image not found". See https://oracle.github.io/odpi/doc/installation.html#macos for help

After some playing around with it I found that as long as I was in $DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH I could run cx_oracle just fine however that's unpractical. I did some more playing around and I found that if I create a $DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH/lib directory and add a link to $DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH/libclntsh.dylib in that directory was able to get it working.

Long story short I think some of these files need to be moved into /lib however for now I don't know which ones. What I did to get it working:

sudo mkdir $ORACLE_HOME/lib
sudo ln -s $DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH/libclntsh.dylib $ORACLE_HOME/lib/

Solved it for me. Thank you!