Installing an updated version of OpenSSL on your Mac OS X

Why would you want to do this?

Unfortunately, Apple currently ships their computers with an outdated version of OpenSSL. You can check which version you have by typing:

$ openssl version

On my system, this returns OpenSSL 0.9.7l 28 Sep 2006. This may be sufficient for you, but I wanted to use sha512, which was not available on the 0.9.7l release.


.: Update :.

Mar. 25, 2011

If you don't want to build OpenSSL from source and want an easy way of upgrading to the latest version of OpenSSL, I'd suggest taking the MacPorts route.

Download the correct .dmg file from http://www.macports.org/install.php. Open it and run the installer.

In the terminal, type:

$ sudo port sync; sudo port selfupdate; sudo port install openssl

That's it!


.: Original :.

Feb. 21, 2009

Prerequisites

Before you can update your version of OpenSSL, you'll have to make sure you have gcc and make installed. You can install these from the Apple Developer Tools CD that came with your computer. Just stick the CD in and install.


Installing OpenSSL

Go to http://openssl.org/ and grab the latest build. Here's a picture of the site as I see it today:

As you can see, the latest build is openssl-0.9.8j. So just download that wherever you want. I put it into ~/tmp. Untar and gunzip it:

$ tar -zxvf openssl-0.9.8j.tar.gz

Change your directory to the newly created folder. Now it's time to configure it. By default, the package is set to install openssl in /usr/local/openssl. I didn't want this, so I ran:

$ ./config --openssldir=~/tmp/openssl/

If you want the default locations, just run:

$ ./config

Now it's time to make:

$ make

And then install:

$ make install

Now I have the latest version of openssl installed in ~/tmp/openssl/bin

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