Sometimes, using the pear installer is not an option.
This could be because you're behind a firewall, or it could be because the
extension you want to install is not available as a PEAR compatible
package, such as unreleased extensions from CVS. If you need to build such
an extension, you can use the lower-level build tools to perform the build
manually.
The phpize command is used to prepare the build
environment for a PHP extension. In the following sample, the sources for
an extension are in a directory named extname:
$ cd extname
$ phpize
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install |
A successful install will have created extname.so and put it
into the PHP
extensions directory. You'll need
to and adjust php.ini and add an extension=extname.so
line before you can use the extension.