How to build QGIS with OCI on OSX 10.10

As opposed to its Windows counterpart, the OSX version of QGIS doesn’t come with a built-in OCI library which is sad when you have to work with Oracle Spatial databases. Fortunately, you can build your own version from source and add whatever dependency you’d like to use, including the OCI library, so let’s get started!

Prerequisites

We will need several things:

• Homebrew
• CMake
• Git
• Oracle Instant Client:download it here

Homebrew is a fanstastic package manager for OSX (more info here), to install it launch your Terminal and run:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Now were are ready to install CMake and Git:

brew install cmake
brew install git

Install Oracle Instant Client

Go to Oracle Instant Client webpage, download both OCI SDK and OCI Basic (make sure to download the right version for your OS: 32-bit or 64-bit) and unpack the archives. (For the sake of the tutorial, let’s say both files are unzipped in /Users/loudtyping/Downloads/oci).

cd /Users/loudtyping/Downloads/oci

Rename files and copy them to /usr/local/lib/:

mv libclntsh.dylib.11.1 libclntsh.dylib
sudo cp libclntsh.dylib libnnz11.dylib /usr/local/lib/ 

Change install path:

sudo install_name_tool -id /usr/local/lib/libclntsh.dylib -change /ade/b/2649109290/oracle/ldap/lib/libnnz11.dylib /usr/local/lib/libnnz11.dylib /usr/local/lib/libclntsh.dylib

Install QGIS dependencies

Follow the steps in the QGIS documentation to install the required dependencies. Check that you have installed the following:

• GDAL (via installer)
• GRASS (via installer)
• Postgres (via installer)
• SpatialIndex
• Python 2.x
• Qwt 6.0.2
• SIP
• QScintilla2
• PyQt
• Bison 2.4

Download and build QGIS

Create a folder to store QGIS source:

mkdir qgis
cd qgis

Clone the latest version of QGIS:

git init
git remote add -f -t master -m master qgisupstream https://github.com/qgis/QGIS.git
git merge qgisupstream

Go into the unpacked folder and create a build folder:

mkdir build
cd build

It’s time to build our installation, run the cmake command with the path to your OCI SDK in OCI_INCLUDE_DIR (don’t forget the .. at the end):

cmake -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/Applications \
-D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=MINSIZEREL -D ENABLE_TESTS=FALSE \
-D WITH_PYSPATIALITE=FALSE \
-D SPATIALINDEX_LIBRARY=/usr/local/lib/libspatialindex.dylib \
-D SPATIALINDEX_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/local/include/spatialindex \
-D QWT_LIBRARY=/usr/local/qwt-6.0.2/lib/libqwt.dylib \
-D QWT_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/local/qwt-6.0.2/include \
-D BISON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/local/bin/bison \
-D WITH_ORACLE=true \
-D OCI_LIBRARY=/usr/local/lib/libclntsh.dylib \
-D OCI_INCLUDE_DIR=/Users/loudtyping/Downloads/oci/sdk/include \
..

If anything goes wrong, check the cmake trace, you might be missing a dependency. Finally, run make (you can go grab a cup of coffee) and make install:

make
sudo make install

That’s it, you’re all set! You will find the app in the Applications folder, launch it and enjoy QGIS with its new OCI powers!