Installing PHP5 module on Apache 2 (Ubuntu 16)

Question

I am trying to install php 5.3.21 on Apache 2.4.18 on a Ubuntu 16.04.1 server.
I did the whole download/untar/ configure / make / make install procedure according to the README in the tarball, but could not find the module's .so, meaning I can't load php's code into Apache if I don't have this file.
As far as I know I compiled php correctly. It even passed the tests provided by make test .
How can I instruct make to build this file?

Answer 1

Did you use a correct configure command?

I made one for my server using PHP 5.3:

./configure --prefix=/usr/share/php53 --datadir=/usr/share/php53 --mandir=/usr/share/man --bindir=/usr/bin/php53 --with-libdir=lib/x86_64-linux-gnu --includedir=/usr/include/php53 --sysconfdir=/etc/php53/apache2 --with-config-file-path=/etc/php53/apache2 --with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php53/conf.d --enable-libxml --enable-session --with-pcre-regex=/usr --enable-xml --enable-simplexml --enable-filter --disable-debug --enable-inline-optimization --disable-rpath --disable-static --enable-shared --with-pic --with-gnu-ld --with-mysql --with-gd --with-jpeg-dir --with-png-dir --with-xpm-dir --enable-exif --with-zlib --with-bz2 --with-curl --with-ldap --with-mysqli --with-freetype-dir --enable-soap --enable-sockets --enable-calendar --enable-ftp --enable-mbstring --enable-gd-native-ttf --enable-bcmath --enable-zip --with-pear --with-openssl=/usr --with-imap --with-imap-ssl --with-kerberos --enable-phar --enable-pdo --with-pdo-mysql --with-mysqli --with-mcrypt=shared,/usr

Never had any problems with this configure command.