Mon 18 February 2019
Rust, Cargo, lcrypto/OpenSSL, Mac, and You
If you're trying to compile code on recent versions of macOS, and it tries to link to OpenSSL, you may find yourself driven a bit mad by how odd it all is. The long and short of it is that Apple, in a recent-ish release, removed the headers for their version of OpenSSL, and you need to install a modern version of OpenSSL via Homebrew. This is really straightforward... but won't, in some cases, automatically make your project compile.
This was the case for a project I was working on, which happened to be written in Rust. The resulting errors spewed from Cargo were, after parsing, pretty clear: it was trying and failing to find and link to an OpenSSL installation. This can be confusing to diagnose and fix, since over the years Rust moved pretty quickly, and there's a litany of strange GitHub issue threads devoted to the issue. It crosses over with some macOS issues, and... yeah.
Thus, I'm going to dump my .bashrc fixes here. Throwing the following in your bash profile, then running a cargo clean + build should get your project compiling.
export OPENSSL_ROOT_DIR=$(brew --prefix openssl)
export OPENSSL_LIB_DIR="$OPENSSL_ROOT_DIR/lib"
export OPENSSL_INCLUDE_DIR="$OPENSSL_ROOT_DIR/include"
export LDFLAGS="-L$OPENSSL_ROOT_DIR/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I$OPENSSL_ROOT_DIR/include"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$OPENSSL_ROOT_DIR/lib/pkgconfig"
export LIBRARY_PATH="$LIBRARY_PATH:$OPENSSL_ROOT_DIR/lib/"
Exporting these flags ensures that Rust, Cargo, LLVM and crew correctly grok where to find OpenSSL to link against. Hopefully this helps someone else out there, since this can be annoying to diagnose! Some tweaking may be needed depending on how you have your system configured.