This post is about FreeBSD, however the idea is about the same for other Unix systems.
While I tried to install memcached, the system complained with this message:
Cannot find autoconf. Please check your autoconf installation and the $PHP_AUTOCONF environment variable. Then, rerun this script.
This problem is caused by missing couple variables at the shell level: PHP_AUTOCONF, PHP_AUTOHEADER. It is very easy to solve this problem:
1. First, make sure that Autoconf is installed in your system:
#pkg_info | grep autoconf autoconf-2.68 Automatically configure source code on many Un*x platforms autoconf-wrapper-20071109 Wrapper script for GNU autoconf
If autoconf is not available, install it from here:
cd /usr/ports/devel/autoconf268 make install clean
2. Now, we need to set couple variables. This step is very important because you can’t set the variable using sudo export x=y. First, switch to root
sudo su
3. Find out where is autoconf (The location in FreeBSD and Linux are different)
which autoconf
4. Set the autoconf, in my case, it is /usr/local/bin/autoconf
export PHP_AUTOCONF=/usr/local/bin/autoconf
5. Do the same thing for autoheader:
which autoheader export PHP_AUTOHEADER=/usr/local/bin/autoheader
That’s it. Now try to install your software again and the error message should be gone.
–Derrick
Our sponsors:
Thanks for your post, but i’m still having trouble getting it to work, below is the message:
Cannot find autoconf. Please check your autoconf installation and the
$PHP_AUTOCONF environment variable. Then, rerun this script.
I’ve checked the env vars and those match the correct path.
Verify your step with the following command:
echo $PHP_AUTOCONF
Thank you very very much. Helped me to update pecl-APC!
I had this error trying to install php5-mysql on a recent upgrade to mysql 5.6.3.1 on FreeBSD8.2. I found that sym links autoconf and autoheader had not been provided in /usr/local/bin, so did
# ln -s autoconf-2.68 /usr/local/bin/autoconf
# ln -s autoheader-2.68 /usr/local/bin/autoheader
worked fine after that:
gluon# make install clean
===> php5-mysql-5.3.6_1 depends on file: /usr/local/bin/phpize – found
===> php5-mysql-5.3.6_1 depends on file: /usr/local/bin/autoconf-2.68 – found
===> PHPizing for php5-mysql-5.3.6_1
Configuring for:
PHP Api Version: 20090626
Zend Module Api No: 20090626
Zend Extension Api No: 220090626
configure.in:3: warning: prefer named diversions
configure.in:3: warning: prefer named diversions
===> Configuring for php5-mysql-5.3.6_1
…