I am trying to compile libmemcached (1.0.7) on CentOS6, and keep getting the following warning:

...
checking for event.h... no
configure: WARNING: Unable to find libevent
...

I manually compiled libevent (2.0.19) and built it using the following configure line:

OPTIONS="--prefix=/usr/local/_custom/app/libevent"

Everything compiled and installed fine, but I couldn't figure out how to make the system aware that the lib files are in the custom /usr/local/_custom/app/libevent/libdir. I stumbled upon an article and read that I can make the system aware of custom lib paths by adding a custom file to /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ directory:

# /etc/ld.so.conf.d/customApp.conf
/usr/local/_custom/app/libevent/lib

Then I issued the ldconfig command and was able to confirm that libevent was included by issuing this command:

ldconfig -p | ack -i libevent

Seeing that libevent was now included in the ldconfig output, I figured I would be able to compile libmemcached and satisfy the aforementioned warning. Unfortunately it did not. So I took another look at the ldconfig output and noticed this:

libevent_pthreads-2.0.so.5 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/local/_custom/app/libevent/lib/libevent_pthreads-2.0.so.5
libevent_openssl-2.0.so.5 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/local/_custom/app/libevent/lib/libevent_openssl-2.0.so.5
libevent_extra-2.0.so.5 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/local/_custom/app/libevent/lib/libevent_extra-2.0.so.5
libevent_core-2.0.so.5 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/local/_custom/app/libevent/lib/libevent_core-2.0.so.5
libevent-2.0.so.5 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/local/_custom/app/libevent/lib/libevent-2.0.so.5

There are no references to the base links, for example, I would expect to see links to these (ls -la /usr/local/_custom/app/libevent/lib):

libevent.so -> libevent-2.0.so.5.1.7
libevent_openssl.so -> libevent_openssl-2.0.so.5.1.7
libevent_core.so -> libevent_core-2.0.so.5.1.7

So either I am doing something wrong, or the system still does not know where to look to find libevent.so.

-- Update #1 --

I wasn't able to get libmemcached to compile without the warning notice, even after trying to compile using the following configure command:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/_custom/app/libmemcached CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/_custom/app/libevent/include" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/_custom/app/libevent/lib"

I thought for sure this would work because I am directly passing the include and lib directories to the configure command. But it did not.