Posted 11 October 2007.

This is a step by step guide to installing memcached from source on CentOS. To install using yum instead, run yum install memcached. The version of CentOS that I am using is CentOS release 5.2 (Final); to find what version you are using:

  cat /etc/redhat-release

First, install the dependency libevent:

  cd /usr/local/src
  curl -O http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent-1.4.14b-stable.tar.gz
  tar xzvf libevent-1.4.14b-stable.tar.gz 
  cd libevent-1.4.14b-stable
  ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
  make && make install

Next, install memcached:

  cd /usr/local/src
  curl -O http://memcached.googlecode.com/files/memcached-1.4.5.tar.gz
  tar xzvf memcached-1.4.5.tar.gz
  cd memcached-1.4.5
  LDFLAGS='-Wl,--rpath /usr/local/lib' ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
  make && make install

Verify that memcached starts:

  memcached -u root -d 

If there were no errors, make sure it is running:

  ps aux | grep memcached

And finally, to stop memcached:

  pkill memcached

These instructions prevent the following errors:

  memcached: error while loading shared libraries: libevent-1.4.so.2: 
  cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
  configure: error: libevent is required
  If it's already installed, specify its path using --with-libevent=/dir/