Using ODBC with PHP in OS X 10.9 (Mavericks)

In OS X 10.8 and earlier, PHP was built with ODBC support, making it easy to connect to a Caché database:

$ php -r 'phpinfo();' |grep 'ODBC Support'
ODBC Support => enabled

However, this support was removed in OS X 10.9:

$ php -r 'phpinfo();' |grep 'ODBC Support'

Some people use Homebrew, MacPorts, or Fink to get their tools back. If you're comfortable coloring a little outside the lines (i.e., using sudo and the command line), you can build the odbc.so or pdo_odbc.so extension (depending on which API you prefer), and use it with Apple's version of Apache and PHP. You'll need the following:

• C compiler
• iODBC headers
• GNU autoconf
• PHP source code

To get a C compiler, I installed the command line developer tools with a command like the following:

$ xcode-select --install

This opened a prompt that installed them to /Library/Developer. Alternatively, you can install Xcode from the Mac App Store.

OS X ships with the iODBC libraries in /usr/lib, but not the headers. I don't actually remember how I installed them, but I think I downloaded the source from iodbc.org, then copied the following header files to /usr/local/include:

• sql.h
• sqlext.h
• sqltypes.h
• sqlucode.h

The phpize utility used for building a PHP extension depends on GNU autoconf. I downloaded autconf 2.69 from a GNU mirror, then built and installed it to /usr/local using configure and make as follows:

$ ./configure && make && sudo make install

OS X 10.9 ships with PHP 5.4.45. Although you can download that version from a PHP mirror, I downloaded 5.6.26 to fix crashes in pdo_odbc. I built odbc.so with the following commands in the PHP source directory:

$ cd ext/odbc
$ phpize
Configuring for:
PHP Api Version:         20100412
Zend Module Api No:      20100525
Zend Extension Api No:   220100525
$ CPPFLAGS=-DHAVE_IODBC ODBC_TYPE=iodbc ./configure --with-iodbc
...
config.status: creating config.h
$ make
...
Build complete.

The environment variables work around what appear to be broken sections of the configure script. At this point, I copied modules/odbc.so to /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20100525. You can also sudo make install.

I built pdo_odbc.so similarly:

$ cd ext/pdo_odbc
$ phpize
Configuring for:
PHP Api Version:         20100412
Zend Module Api No:      20100525
Zend Extension Api No:   220100525
$ ./configure --with-pdo-odbc=iODBC
...
config.status: creating config.h
$ make
...
Build complete.

With the extensions installed, I enabled them in php.ini. In the /etc directory, I renamed php.ini.default to php.ini, then added the following lines:

extension=pdo_odbc.so
extension=odbc.so

I had previously enabled the PHP module for Apache by editing httpd.conf in /etc/apache2. If you haven't already, uncomment this line:

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Lastly, I restarted Apache:

$ sudo apachectl restart

Now I can develop with PHP and Caché locally on my Mac. Let me know if I've missed a step, or if something works differently in later versions of OS X.