Checking for Location of ICU Headers and Libraries… Not Found

Issue

While compiling PHP from source on CentOS server, we get the error below:

checking for icu-config... no
checking for location of ICU headers and libraries... not found
configure: error: Unable to detect ICU prefix or no failed. 
Please verify ICU install prefix and make sure icu-config works.

Solution

You need to install Components for Unicode Development package as follows:

sudo yum -y install libicu-devel

# yum list installed | grep libicu
libicu.x86_64                        50.2-4.el7_7                   @base
libicu-devel.x86_64                  50.2-4.el7_7                   @base

And then try to re-compile PHP from source and it should be able to compile this time.