Mac OS X Mavericks and pdo_odbc PHP extension

Compiling and installing the pdo_odbc PHP extension is not for the light of heart. After a couple of hours and a lot of reading, I was able to get the pdo_odbc extension working on my Mac. I will try to document the entire process here including the installation of homebrew and the Xcode development tools, which are prerequisites to setting this up. If you have already installed homebrew or the Xcode development tools, then you can skip the first two sections.

Install Homebrew and Xcode development tools

Install homebrew via: http://brew.sh/:

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)"

Then, install Xcode development tools:

$ xcode-select --install

When prompted, click Install.

Next, install autoconf using the brew install command:

$ brew install autoconf

Finally, create the necessary symlinks:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/autoconf/2.69/bin/autoconf /usr/bin/autoconf
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/autoconf/2.69/bin/autoheader /usr/bin/autoheader

Build PHP from Source

Download PHP source code. The latest version at the time of this writing was 5.5: http://www.php.net/get/php-5.5.13.tar.gz/from/a/mirror

Next, open the Terminal application via: Application > Utilities > Terminal. Then browse to downloads folder and extract tarballs:

$ cd ~/Downloads
$ tar -xzvf php-5.5.13.tar.gz

Then, we need to PHPize the extension:

$ cd ~/Downloads/php-5.5.13/ext/pdo_odbc
$ phpize

Then configure the installation:

$ ./configure

The last line of the output should indicate the configuration was setup correctly: config.status: creating config.h.

Run make to create the .so extension file

$ make

You should see a success massage indicating that the build was completed: Build complete.

Copy Extension module

Now that we have built our custom pdo_odbc binary we need to copy the pdo_odbc.so file to our PHP extensions directory:

$ sudo cp modules/`pdo_odbc`.so /usr/lib/php/extensions/

Edit php.ini

We’re almost there. Next, edit your php.ini file and add the extension:

$ sudo nano /etc/php.ini

Add the following line at the end:

extension=`pdo_odbc`.so

Restart Apache

Finally, restart Apache:

$ sudo apachectl restart