OSSL-GUIDE-INTRODUCTION(7SSL)

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version 4.0.3 · 6 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

💖 ossl-guide-introduction — OpenSSL Guide: An introduction to OpenSSL 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the OpenSSL Guide 💅 this is ossl-guide-introduction(7) from the 7SSL manual, and fr fr it's the little front door to the whole OpenSSL cinematic universe. grab a snack, we're doing cryptography lore 🧚✨

✨ WHAT IS OPENSSL? ✨

OpenSSL is a robust, commercial-grade, full-featured toolkit for general-purpose cryptography and secure communication. no cap, that's the actual energy. 🔥

and like, how do you even touch it? three ways, babes:

  • there's a command line application that lets you do all the cryptography-adjacent things — generating keys, generating certificates, the whole vibe 🎀
  • there are two libraries that application developers can use to implement cryptography-based capabilities and to securely communicate across a network 🌈
  • and there's a set of providers that supply implementations of a broad set of cryptographic algorithms 👑

OpenSSL is fully open source. versions 3.0 and above are distributed under the Apache v2 license. iconic behaviour, truly. ⭐

🌸 GETTING AND INSTALLING OPENSSL 🌸

okay so, the OpenSSL Project develops and distributes the source code for OpenSSL. you can obtain that source code via the OpenSSL website (<https://www.openssl.org/source>) 🦋

<aqua>plot twist:</aqua> you might not even need to build it. many Operating Systems (notably Linux distributions) supply pre-built OpenSSL binaries — either already pre-installed or available via that OS's package management system. check whether this applies to you first before you attempt to build OpenSSL from source code. save yourself the weekend, bestie 😭

some third parties also supply OpenSSL binaries (e.g. for Windows and some other platforms). the OpenSSL project maintains a list of these third parties at <https://github.com/openssl/openssl/wiki/Binaries> 💜

so you're building from source anyway? respect. here's the rundown:

  1. download the appropriate files for the version you want to use from the link given above ⬆️
  2. extract the contents of the tar.gz archive file that you downloaded into an appropriate directory 📦
  3. inside that archive you'll find a file named INSTALL.md which supplies detailed instructions on how to build and install OpenSSL from source. read it carefully so you actually get a successful build, not a sad one 🙈
  4. in that directory you'll also find a set of NOTES files with further platform specific information. carefully read the file appropriate to your platform. 👀
  5. and as well as the platform specific NOTES files, there's also a NOTES-PERL.md file that provides information about setting up Perl for use by the OpenSSL build system across multiple platforms 🐪
⚠️ listen up, this part matters. sometimes you may want to build and install OpenSSL from source on a system which already has a pre-built version of OpenSSL installed on it via the Operating System package management system (for example, if you want to use a newer version of OpenSSL than the one supplied by your OS). in that case it is strongly recommended to install OpenSSL to a different location than where the pre-built version is installed. you should never replace the pre-built version with a different version — this may break your system. do not do it. I'm so serious. 💀

🎀 CONTENTS OF THE OPENSSL GUIDE 🎀

the OpenSSL Guide is a series of documentation pages (starting with this one, hi 👋) that introduce some of the main concepts in OpenSSL. you can either read the guide end-to-end in order, or just skip to the parts most applicable to your use case. main character energy, choose your own path 💅

heads up though: later pages may depend on and assume knowledge from earlier pages. so if you skip, you skip at your own risk, bestie 🤷‍♀️

the pages in the guide are as follows:

Copyright 2023-2025 The OpenSSL Project Authors. All Rights Reserved. 🫶

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0 (the "License"). You may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You can obtain a copy in the file LICENSE in the source distribution or at <https://www.openssl.org/source/license.html> 📜

and that's the whole vibe check, bestie — this page is from OpenSSL 4.0.3, dated 2026-09-29. go read the next one, you're gonna slay 💖✨🎀

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