PHP 5.6 Oracle external authentication and OCI_CRED_EXT with PDO problem

Question

I am wondering how it would be possible to use authentication using a secure external password store aka wallet with PDO OCI.

See Oracle external authentication and OCI_CRED_EXT in the underground php oracle manual. and

https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/19/dbseg/configuring-authentication.html#GUID-803496D2-19C7-4F02-94EC-C13EDD8FB17B (jump to chapter 3.2.9)

Following works fine with oci8:

$conn = oci_connect('/', '', $db, 'UTF8',OCI_CRED_EXT);

note the OCI_CRED_EXT attribute!

But how can pass that option to a PDO OCI connection? Following might be close, but does not work:

$opt = [
      PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE => PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION,
      PDO::ATTR_DEFAULT_FETCH_MODE => PDO::FETCH_NUM,
      'session_mode' => OCI_CRED_EXT,

];

  try{
      $conn = new PDO("oci:dbname=".$db.';charset=UTF8', "/","", $opt);
  }
  catch(PDOException $e){
      echo ($e->getMessage());
  }

Is it possible at all? Thank you very much!

Answer 1

It's not possible with PDO_OCI. The implementation doesn't set OCI_CRED_EXT anywhere, unlike with OCI8. If you're using Oracle Cloud ADB, note that wallets are now optional. If you use Instant Client 19.14 or 21.5 you can use 1-way ("walletless") TLS, similar to shown in https://towardsdev.com/connect-to-oracle-autonomous-database-from-python-without-using-the-instance-wallet-64bd16e4f31c