build emacs in your home dir on minimal server without X and stuff

configure.sh

make
./configure --prefix=/home/<yourhome>/ --with-x-toolkit=no --with-xpm=no --with-jpeg=no --with-png=no --with-gif=no --with-tiff=no
make install

Shouldn't the ./configure command be before the make command?

Shouldn't the ./configure command be before the make command?

I suspect you are right, generally ./configure comes first. This was a while ago and I suppose its possible that there was some reason for running make first but I sure did not make a note of it. My guess is this was a typo on my part--or I just copied what was in my history.

Commenting here as this is a top search engine hit; the configure suggestion here is useful.

Use ./autogen.sh as the first step instead of make:

./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=$HOME --with-x-toolkit=no --with-xpm=no --with-jpeg=no --with-png=no --with-gif=no --with-tiff=no
make
make install

Running make first can work because make determines that it should run ./autogen.sh, but it will also run configure and start building on its own (resulting in "wasted" CPU cycles as emacs will be rebuilt after the next ./configure). Here's what make says if run before ./autogen.sh:

There seems to be no "configure" file in this directory.
Running ./autogen.sh ...
./autogen.sh
... [snip] ...
There seems to be no Makefile in this directory.
Running ./configure ...

The Emacs README has detail on 'autogen.sh':

The shell script 'autogen.sh' generates 'configure' and other files by running Autoconf (which in turn uses GNU m4), and configures files in the .git subdirectory if you are using Git. If you want to use it, you will need to install recent versions of these build tools. This should be needed only if you edit files like 'configure.ac' that specify Emacs's autobuild procedure.