I use a Virtual Private Server on DreamHost to run the Toastmasters District 101 website. For the most part, I’m happy with their service, and with a shell prompt, it’s usually easy to install whatever software I need.
Except Python 3.7. Python 3.7 requires a newer level of OpenSSL than DreamHost offers, and since I don’t have root access on a VPS, I can’t just replace OpenSSL. Compiling a current version and installing it in a directory ($HOME/usr/local) was easy enough:
./config --prefix=$HOME/usr/local --openssldir=$HOME/usr/local/openssl
make
make test
make install
Building Python 3.7 was also easy, but getting it to use my copy of OpenSSL was not.
At first, I tried adding my OpenSSL to LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which worked, but it made git complain: no version information available (required by ssh), and that seemed unfortunate (and made me worry that I might break other things).
After much searching, I found Python issue 21541, which had the hints I needed to statically-link my copy of OpenSSL into the Python executable.
First, run configure:
./configure --prefix=$HOME/opt/python-3.7.0 --with-openssl=$HOME/usr/local/
Then uncomment and change the section of Modules/Setup dealing with SSL to this:
# Socket module helper for SSL support; you must comment out the other
# socket line above, and possibly edit the SSL variable:
SSL=$HOME/usr/local
_ssl _ssl.c \
DUSE_SSL -I$(SSL)/include -I$(SSL)/include/openssl \
L$(SSL)/lib -Wl,-Bsymbolic $(SSL)/lib/libssl.a $(SSL)/lib/libcrypto.a
After that, the usual make && make install worked.