2.1 Building the Module on a Unix System

pyOpenSSL uses distutils, so there really shouldn't be any problems. To build the library:

python setup.py build

If your OpenSSL header files aren't in /usr/include, you may need to supply the -I flag to let the setup script know where to look. The same goes for the libraries of course, use the -L flag. Note that build won't accept these flags, so you have to run first build_ext and then build! Example:

python setup.py build_ext -I/usr/local/ssl/include -L/usr/local/ssl/lib
python setup.py build

Now you should have a directory called OpenSSL that contains e.g. SSL.so and __init__.py somewhere in the build dicrectory, so just:

python setup.py install

If you, for some arcane reason, don't want the module to appear in the site-packages directory, use the --prefix option.

You can, of course, do

python setup.py --help

to find out more about how to use the script.