Compiling Python 2.5 with SSL support

If you compile Python 2.5.x from source, you need to jump through some hoops so that SSL support is enabled. Googling around, I found Patrick Altman's excellent blog post talking about this very issue.

In my case, I needed to enable SSL support for Python 2.5.2 on CentOS 5.1. I already had the openssl development libraries installed:

# yum list installed | grep ssl
mod_ssl.i386 1:2.2.3-11.el5_1.cento installed
openssl.i686 0.9.8b-8.3.el5_0.2 installed
openssl-devel.i386 0.9.8b-8.3.el5_0.2 installed

Here's what I did next, following Patrick's post:

1) edited Modules/Setup.dist from the Python 2.5.2 source distribution and made sure the correct lines were put back in (they were commented out by default):

_socket socketmodule.c

# Socket module helper for SSL support; you must comment out the other
# socket line above, and possibly edit the SSL variable:
#SSL=/usr/local/ssl
_ssl _ssl.c \
-DUSE_SSL -I$(SSL)/include -I$(SSL)/include/openssl \
-L$(SSL)/lib -lssl -lcrypto

2) ran ./configure; make; make install

3) verified that I can access socket.ssl:

# python2.5
Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, May 19 2008, 14:23:27)
[GCC 4.1.2 20070626 (Red Hat 4.1.2-14)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import socket
>>> socket.ssl
function ssl at 0xb7ef410c>

That's it. Not sure why it's so non-intuitive though.