When I wanted to build the latest PHP for a server I found several guides online. Sadly none of them worked right away.
So after finally getting it all to work like I wanted to, I decided to quickly write up this guide.

I start with a clean Ubuntu 8.04 install. So, first things first:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo shutdown -r now

Now that we’re up-to-date, let’s begin:

sudo apt-get build-dep php5
sudo apt-get install libmcrypt-dev libc-client-dev checkinstall

Now we have all the crap to build PHP with. Let’s get PHP itself:

cd /tmp/
wget http://us3.php.net/get/php-5.3.0.tar.gz/from/this/mirror
tar xvzf php-5.3.0.tar.gz
cd php-5.3.0/

Now all that is left is to build PHP…

./configure --prefix=/usr --with-apxs2=/usr/bin/apxs2 --with-config-file-path=/etc/php5/apache2 --with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php5/apache2/conf.d --mandir=/usr/share/man --disable-debug --with-regex=php --disable-rpath --disable-static --with-pic --with-layout=GNU --with-pear=/usr/share/php --enable-calendar --enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvshm --enable-sysvmsg --enable-bcmath --with-bz2 --enable-ctype --with-db4 --without-gdbm --with-iconv --enable-exif --enable-ftp --with-gettext --enable-mbstring --with-pcre-regex=/usr --enable-shmop --enable-sockets --enable-wddx --with-libxml-dir=/usr --with-zlib --with-kerberos=/usr --with-openssl=/usr --enable-soap --enable-zip --with-exec-dir=/usr/lib/php5/libexec --without-mm --with-curl=shared,/usr --with-zlib-dir=/usr --with-gd=shared,/usr --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-gmp=shared,/usr --with-jpeg-dir=shared,/usr --with-xpm-dir=shared,/usr/X11R6 --with-png-dir=shared,/usr --with-freetype-dir=shared,/usr --with-t1lib=shared,/usr --with-ldap=shared,/usr --with-ldap-sasl=/usr --with-mhash=shared,/usr --with-mysql=shared,/usr --with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config --with-pspell=shared,/usr --with-unixODBC=shared,/usr --with-xsl=shared,/usr --with-snmp=shared,/usr --with-sqlite=shared,/usr --with-mssql=shared,/usr --with-tidy=shared,/usr --with-xmlrpc=shared --with-pgsql=shared,/usr --enable-gd-native-ttf --enable-dba=shared --with-openssl-dir=shared,/usr --enable-gd-jis-conv --enable-json --with-mcrypt=shared,/usr --enable-pcntl --with-pdo-mysql --with-pdo-odbc=unixODBC,/usr --with-pdo-pgsql=shared,/usr --with-pdo-sqlite --enable-xmlreader --with-tsrm-pthreads --with-imap --with-imap-ssl

I’m sure this doesn’t enable ALL features in PHP, but it works for me so far. If I’ll ever find I was missing something, I’ll be sure to update this post.

When building make sure to pass the correct number of CPUs to make with the -j parameter to safe some time.

make -j2

And now we wait…

Now we need to add these lines to our httpd.conf (which is empty in this case)

#LoadModule directive to aid module installations
#LoadModule dummy_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_dummy.so

Now we can build our .deb for PHP.

sudo checkinstall -D --install=no --fstrans=no --maintainer=your@email --reset-uids=yes --nodoc --pkgname=php5 --pkgversion=5.3 --pkgrelease=200908060830 --arch=amd64

And that’s it. Now you have a .deb which you can install on a different system or (as checkinstall told you) just put on this system with dpkg -i.

Have fun