PyOpenSSL in a virtualenv on OS X

23rd May 2011

If you’re a Python programmer, no doubt you’re now familiar with virtualenv. One of its nicest features is --no-site-packages, which isolates your virtual environment from any packages that are already installed globally.

However, if you’re on OS X, using --no-site-packages means you can’t use the OpenSSL library that’s installed by default. Trying to easy_install or pip install pyopenssl into your virtualenv won’t work, since OS X doesn’t ship with OpenSSL headers.

The solution to this little problem is to symlink the system OpenSSL library into your virtualenv:

ln -sf /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Extras/lib/python/OpenSSL lib/python2.6/