Apache installation; libpcre error

1. Download PCRE from PCRE.org

2. Compile it with a prefix and install it:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/pcre
make
make install

3. Go back to where your Apache installation is and compile Apache with PCRE:

--with-pcre=/usr/local/pcre

For me (Fedora Linux), it was enough to just install the pcre-devel: yum install -y pcre-devel. Didn't even have to use --with-pcre afterwards.

Debian

In a clean installation of Debian 9.5, during the installation of Apache it is necessary to have some packages and libraries to avoid errors. Next I show the type of error and its respective solution

Configuration

• configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH

  $ sudo apt-get install build-essential

• configure: error: pcre-config for libpcre not found. PCRE is required and available from http://pcre.org/

  $ sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev

Then I make the configuration indicating that it is installed in the path /usr/local and not in /usr/local/apache2, otherwise I will have library errors. The idea is that the libraries created for httpd end in /usr/local/lib so that the dynamic linker knows them.

$ configure --prefix /usr/local

Compilation

And for the compilation the following the installation of some packages also would avoid us errors in a clean installation of Debian.

• xml/apr_xml.c:35:19: fatal error: expat.h: No such file or directory.

  $ sudo apt-get install libexpat1-dev.

It is recommended to use the -j3 parameter to make the compilation faster. Although it could also be ignored.

$ make -j3

I was other problem compiling apache2 in CentOS with pcre. I installed pcre in other location "/custom/location/pcre" and configure command throw the following error

configure: error: Did not find pcre-config script at "/custom/location/pcre"

to solve it changing the flag --with-pcre=/custom/location/pcre to --with-pcre=/custom/location/pcre/bin/pcre2-config

In RHEL 3 is not necessary setting parameter --with-pcre pointing to pcre-config. Only need pcre path

My configure command:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 --with-pcre=/usr/local/pcre