Fixing OpenSSL Build Failure

Fixing OpenSSL Build Failure | Generated by AI

Home 2025.08

You’re running into the classic “openssl-sys” build failure because you don’t have the system’s pkg-config tool or the OpenSSL development headers installed. On Ubuntu/Debian, the simplest fix is:

Install pkg-config and OpenSSL dev-headers
```
sudo apt update
sudo apt install pkg-config libssl-dev
```
- pkg-config lets the Rust build script detect where OpenSSL is.
- libssl-dev provides the headers & libs (the “–dev” package).
Re-run your build
```
cargo clean
cargo run
```

Alternative: use the “vendored” feature

If you don’t want to rely on system OpenSSL (or you lack root access), you can ask the crate to build a bundled copy of OpenSSL from source:

In your Cargo.toml, change your dependency to:

[dependencies]
openssl = { version = "0.10", features = ["vendored"] }

Then build again:
```
cargo clean
cargo run
```

This will compile OpenSSL itself and link against that, avoiding the need for a system install.

(Optional) Custom OpenSSL install

If you have OpenSSL installed in a non-standard location, you can point the build to it:

export OPENSSL_DIR=/path/to/your/openssl
export OPENSSL_LIB_DIR=$OPENSSL_DIR/lib
export OPENSSL_INCLUDE_DIR=$OPENSSL_DIR/include

Then re-run cargo run. This tells openssl-sys exactly where to find headers and libraries.

Note: The warning about edition2024 being stabilized is harmless—you can remove that feature from your Cargo.toml, but it won’t block your build.

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