Solving -lssl Not Found Problem Under macOS Catalina

Catalina sucks. macOS sucks. It updates and updates and makes things obselete almost everyday. Yet we love it and we use it. So here we are, trying to figure out the mysterious disappearance of -lssl!

Before Catalina

If you are still using Mojave or something, the solution is straightforward. Just

xcode-select --install

And you are done!

Of course, you need to have Xcode installed first. Or do you? Just joking! Haha! xcode-select doesn’t require xcode installed. macOS is that fun.

After Catalina

I was wrong. The macOS openssl is still here after all. Please check the ERRATA! section below.

With this great update, the openssl library as we know seems to be gone forever from the default Xcode toolkit. But that’s OK! We will just get it from brew. You must’ve installed that, right? Otherwise, you can get it from here.

After that, you could just

brew install openssl

And after that’s done,

export LIBRARY_PATH=$LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/Cellar/openssl/1.0.2t/lib

The directory above might vary. I am just pointing it to the newest version in the time of the writing. But after this, you could continue to build your project! Have fun!

Of course, this is a temporary solution. There might be a more permanent solution such as creating a symbolic link & add the export statement into your .bashrc or .zshrc, however they might not be very elegant. But at least the library now works as we know it, right?

ERRATA!

So I was wrong; I didn’t do too much research. Sorry. macOS still gets its openssl library, and it is right here: /usr/local/opt/openssl.

So instead of

export LIBRARY_PATH=$LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/Cellar/openssl/1.0.2t/lib

you can just:

export LIBRARY_PATH=$LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/opt/openssl