/cc @tianfyang: can you review? Maybe a delayed setup similar to PHP OCI8's is more efficient?

Hi @KiNgMaR the problem is when running PHP-FPM, the process doesn't load environment, right?
I found a workaround to set env variables before PHP-FPM starts up. I tried it in my Linux box and it works for me:
In /etc/init.d/php-fpm, add (beware the space between the dot and the slash)
. /etc/profile
and modify the /etc/profile to add
. /home/user/env.sh
Then modify php configuration file by adding env[MY_ENV_VAR_1] = 'value1' under the [www] section. Lastly, restart the php-fpm.

Can you please try if this workaround works for you?

To me, the issue seems to be a PHP-FPM bug rather than a PDO_OCI bug. Your changes can fix this issue, but it will impact the performance as PDO_OCI would have to create OCI Env handle for each process instead of having only one OCI Env handle in the lifetime of the module.

IMHO, this is not a bug.

Indeed, environment need to be set before FPM is launched.
BTW, no workaround will solve the need for library path (LD_LIBRARY_PATH to oracle client library)

Linux Distro, for years, use the /etc/sysconfig/php-fpm (loaded from SysV init script or EnvironmentFile systemd unit file) for such need

It definitely is a bug. It is only noticeable for the NLS_LANG environment variable, because this is read from within OCIEnvCreate (and never again later). The only "workaround" is to disable clear_env in the php-fpm config. However, this means that all variables from a shell may be forwarded into worker processes, which can be an issue.

To summarize, necessary prerequisites to run into the bug:

• use php-fpm
• clear_env=yes (default value) in php-fpm config
• env[NLS_LANG] = ... in php-fpm config

Symptoms:
NLS_LANG setting is not applied, because OCIEnvCreate runs during the MINIT phase, which is always executed before fpm_env_init_child (where the worker process environment is populated).

Possible fix:
Call OCIEnvCreate later. Either on demand or during RINIT. On demand is probably better :)

Also, in response to @remicollet, LD_LIBRARY_PATH is not needed to use OCI or PDO_OCI. On our systems, /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ is used instead. For our PHP workers, only selected environment variables are set via env[...] = ....

@KiNgMaR you can still set clear_env = yes in the FPM config file. The workaround I mentioned above is to set environment variables needed for loading modules like PDO_OCI before FPM is started.

With the workaround above, you can set NLS settings in the . /home/user/env.sh, so that PDO_OCI can pick up the settings when is loaded. In php-fpm.config, set clear_env = yes to avoid the worker process accessing the shell environment variables and set your own environment variables for worker processes.

Hi @tianfyang, that should be a valid workaround. However, in my testing it was not picking up NLS_LANG correctly either. I can try again if needed.
On a second note, as an average user, I would expect NLS_LANG in php-fpm.conf to work not only for oci8, but also for pdo_oci. 😃

Hi @KiNgMaR , we're still deciding whether we should merge this fix in. I've tested the your code change and it looks good. The only concern is the performance impact. I understand OCI8 is using the same way but for PDO_OCI user, it will be a performance degradation. Will let you know our decision soon.

Just out of curiosity, you seem to be using both OCI8 and PDO_OCI as you've submitted another PR for PDO_OCI (merged). Any particular reason for using both drivers?

Hi @tianfyang,

1. I can amend the patch so that the initialization is done on-demand in the realm of pdo_oci_handle_factory instead of MINIT or RINIT. That should eliminate most of the overhead, right?
2. We have different teams here and most of them started using oci8 when pdo_oci was still marked as unstable. Since then, some simpler applications have switched to pdo_oci.

Hi @KiNgMaR

We have decided it as a bug and will merge this fix in soon.

Doing the initialization in pdo_oci_handle_factory will be the same to RINIT since an OCI environment has to be created per process.

Comment on behalf of tianfyan at php.net:

Merged. Thanks for your contribution.