Compiling OpenSSL 1.0 for older package versions

Running older versions of software is always a pain. There will be missing libraries, compilation errors and what not. These issues can be mitigated little by using a package manager that manages the different versions of the software. But most package managers such as asdf download the source (yea OSS) and compile on your machine.

Most of the tools and libraries work really good, but there is one error that keeps coming again and again.

OpenSSL 1.0 to 1.1 Migration

OpenSSL is the defacto library for TLS and SSL protocols and is used by almost all programs that interact with the internet. They are a compile time dependency for a lot of programs and tools. For improved security OpenSSL migrated from 1.0 to 1.1 with a lot of breaking changes. Since OpenSSL handles critical security measures all the distros started pushing the latest version. This causes a new problem for older libraries.

For example python 3.5 requires OpenSSL 1.0 and it fails with the latest 1.1 release of it.

Compiling OpenSSL 1.0 locallly

We need to compile OpenSSL ourselves and put it somewhere from which we can access it when required.

curl https://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.0.2r.tar.gz  | tar xfz - 
cd openssl-1.0.2r 
./config --prefix=/usr/local/openssl-1.0.2r -fpic 
make 
sudo make install 
cd .. 
rm -rf openssl-1.0.2r creates=/usr/local/openssl-1.0.2r

This downloads the 1.0.2 version of OpenSSL, compiles it and copies it into /usr/local/openssl-1.0.2r. This would help prevent your global install from being polluted.

Using it

I only had issues with installing older Elixir and Python versions while using asdf.

• Python : LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/openssl-1.0.2r/lib" CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/openssl-1.0.2r/include" asdf install python 3.5.0
• Elixir : export KERL_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS="--disable-debug --without-javac --with-ssl=/usr/local/openssl-1.0.2r"

Happy Legacy Hacking !