I have oracle instantclient 19.3 installed and can see that OCI8 is loaded in PHP from a terminal by running php -m. I also added LD_LIBRARY_PATH and ORACLE_HOME and environment variables to /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf. They show up correctly in the environment section in phpinfo.
However, oci8 still does not show loading from apache.
Any suggestions on what else I can try to get this to work?
On Linux, LD_LIBRARY_PATH must be set before a process starts.
On Oracle Linux 8 / RHEL 8 I found that I needed to edit /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf and add:
env[LD_LIBRARY_PATH] = /usr/lib/oracle/21/client64/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
I had installed the Oracle Instant Client RPMs packages; change the path to suit your library location.
I also disabled SELinux with setenforce permissive to avoid the error ORA-12546: TNS:permission denied.
When using Instant Client, you should not set ORACLE_HOME.