Install software from source on a shared Linux server

It's a very common task that installing a software from source on a shared Linux server. If you have root privilege, it suffice to install the package by "sudo apt-get install package_name" on Ubuntu or Fedora, or "yum install package_name" on redhat or centOS. However, the common case is that we do not have root privilege and do not have write access to folders other than $HOME. To install a software or package in this situation, we have to build it from source as follows.

$ mkdir -p ~/tmp      # create a temp folder for installation process
$ export TEMP=~/tmp   # set it to be the sys tmp folder
$ wget url            # get the package source from URL, or you can upload it to the server by sftp
$ unzip file          # if the package is .zip
$ tar xf file         # if the package is a tar ball
$ cd source           # source should be replaced by the folder you just unpacked from .zip or .tar
$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME
$ make
$ make install
$ make clean