Installing SSL on CentOS | My Virtual Time Capsule

Installing SSL on CentOS

Extracted from the Source with modification:

Recently on a couple of older CentOS machines I’ve found that the stock Python doesn’t have SSL support, which obviously makes trying to make a HTTPS connection impossible.

The error that comes back from the socket module is:

    AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'ssl'

To get SSL support you will have to compile Python from source and it’s not the most intuitive problem to solve. First up check you have OpenSSL installed correctly. OpenSSL is normally installed in "/usr/bin/openssl", you can use yum to check if it’s installed;

    yum list installed | grep ssl

if for some reason you don’t have it, you can easily install it using yum.

    yum install openssl openssl-devel

Then you will need to get a copy of the Python source, which you can find from the download site.

You then need to edit the Modules/Setup.dist file and uncomment the following (starting on line number 215 in my 2.6 source):

    SSL=/urs/local/ssl

    _ssl _ssl.c

        -DUSE_SSL -I$(SSL)/include -I$(SSL)/include/openssl

        -L$(SSL)/lib -lssl -lcrypto

(You might also need to uncomment the line above starting SSL to point it to your openssl instillation if it can’t be found in your $PATH)

Then run the standard setup:

    ./configure

    make altinstall prefix=~/python2.6.5 exec-prefix=~/python2.6.5

(NOTE: If you are installing a separate Python version from the one

that comes with the distro, it's normally sensible to use the

 altinstall option and not throttle the existing instillation.

That way you don't interfere with OS specific stuff using

Python - such as yum on CentOS)

Once it’s all done, you can test by running the following:

    python -c 'from socket import ssl'

All done! probably shouldn’t be as tricky as that…

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