Installation of HTTPD 2.4 on RHEL 6.9

Hello everyone,

So what I am trying to do is install Apache 2.4 onto a RHEL 6.9 Server. Apache 2.4 ships with RHEL 7 but doing a fresh install or an upgrade is not realistic.

So these are the steps I took.
1. I downloaded the files from http://apache.mirrors.lucidnetworks.net//httpd/httpd-2.4.33.tar.gz and unzipped them
2. I uninstalled the current httpd 2.2 version that is installed.
3. I also installed apr, apr-utils & pcre2 from source as well.
4. I build httpd from source then using the following commands:
./configure --with-included-apr --enable-so --with-pcre2=/usr/local/pcre --with-pcre2=/usr/local/pcre/pcre2-config
make
make install

It seems to install for me as I get this message

Server Version: 2.4.33
Install prefix: /usr/local/apache2
C compiler: gcc -std=gnu99
CFLAGS: -g -O2 -pthread
CPPFLAGS: -DLINUX -D_REENTRANT -D_GNU_SOURCE
LDFLAGS:
LIBS:
C preprocessor: gcc -E

However, when I try to run service httpd start or httpd -v it does not work.
It does seem to work when I run the following command /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl -k start.

So why is the traditional way not working? Have I over looked something.

any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Patrick Broderick