Below steps would be more than enough to recompile php on stock centos/fedora machines. This would be best suited for servers with out any control panel. For ones with control panel, you need to first take the configure command from the phpinfo and then appended what is required.
Before proceeding, it is recommended that you have httpd-devel installed in your server.
# rpm -qa | grep httpd-devel
If the above doesn’t yield any result, ensure to install it using yum.
# yum install httpd-devel
Now let us start with the steps of PHP compilation.
# cd /usr/local/src
# tar -jxvf php-5.2.13.tar.bz2
# cd php-5.2.13
# ‘./configure’ ‘–prefix=/usr/local/php’ ‘–with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs’ ‘–with-png-dir=/usr’ ‘–enable-gd-native-ttf’ ‘–without-gdbm’ ‘–with-gettext’ ‘–with-gmp’ ‘–with-iconv’ ‘–with-jpeg-dir=/usr’ ‘–with-openssl’ ‘–with-zlib’ ‘–enable-exif’ ‘–enable-ftp’ ‘–enable-magic-quotes’ ‘–enable-sockets’ ‘–enable-wddx’ ‘–with-kerberos’ ‘–enable-shmop’ ‘–enable-calendar’ ‘–with-libxml-dir=/usr’ ‘–enable-pcntl’ ‘–enable-mbstring=shared’ ‘–without-sqlite’ ‘–enable-mbregex’ ‘–with-gd’ ‘–enable-bcmath’ ‘–enable-dba’ ‘–with-xmlrpc’ ‘–with-mysql=/usr/bin/’ ‘–with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config’ ‘–enable-dom’ ‘–with-xsl’ ‘–enable-soap’ ‘–with-xsl=/usr’ ‘–enable-xmlreader’ ‘–enable-xmlwriter’ ‘–enable-pdo’ –with-pdo-mysql=/usr’ ‘–with-pdo-sqlite=/usr’ ‘–enable-json’ ‘–enable-zip’ ‘–with-pspell’ ‘–with-mhash=/usr’ ‘–with-tidy=/usr’ ‘–with-curl=/usr’ ‘–with-mcrypt=/usr’ ‘–enable-gd-native-ttf’ ‘–with-ttf’ ‘–with-t1lib=/usr’
You may get errors related to missing libraries in the above command. Those all are available in yum. Install the library and its devel package and execute the above command once again. Take an example of missing freetype library, below steps needs to be followed.
#yum search freetype
# yum install freetype.i386 freetype-devel.i386
And once the required library is installed go and execute the configure command string again until all libraries required are installed and configure command creates required scripts and files to get ready for the next step of compilation.
# cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l
# make -j4 [4 is result from earlier command]
# cp .libs/libphp5.so /etc/httpd/modules/
# make -j4 install [may have to update the httpd.conf file so as to remove the php module added again in it by this command]
And now, you have php compiled running on your server, which you may confirm using
# php -v