Unable to compile from source due to configure error: Cannot find ssl headers

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on March 30th 2022 - Listed in Linux

If you need to compile a program from source, you might run into an error with missing header files. In this example this happened while compiling NRPE:

ck@mint ~/src/nrpe-4.0.3 $ ./configure
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking what the operating system is ... linux
checking what the distribution type is ... ubuntu
checking what init system is being used ... systemd
checking what inetd is being used ... systemd
checking for which paths to use ... default
checking for which init file to use ... default-service
checking for which inetd files to use ... default-socket
checking for gcc... gcc
[...]
checking for scandir... yes
checking for socklen_t... yes
checking for type of socket size... size_t
checking for Kerberos include files... configure: WARNING: could not find include files
checking for pkg-config... pkg-config
checking for SSL headers... configure: error: Cannot find ssl headers

In Debian-based distributions (including Ubuntu and Linux Mint) the header files of a library (SSL in this case) can usually be found in the "library-dev" package. In the example of OpenSSL this is libssl-dev. Just install the missing package:

ck@mint ~ $ sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

And then compile again:

ck@mint ~/src/nrpe-4.0.3 $ ./configure
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking what the operating system is ... linux
checking what the distribution type is ... ubuntu
checking what init system is being used ... systemd
checking what inetd is being used ... systemd
checking for which paths to use ... default
checking for which init file to use ... default-service
checking for which inetd files to use ... default-socket
checking for gcc... gcc
[...]
*** Configuration summary for nrpe 4.0.3 2020-04-28 ***:

 General Options:
 -------------------------
 NRPE port:    5666
 NRPE user:    nagios
 NRPE group:   nagios
 Nagios user:  nagios
 Nagios group: nagios


Review the options above for accuracy.  If they look okay,
type 'make all' to compile the NRPE daemon and client
or type 'make' to get a list of make options.

If other missing header errrors show up, the required dev packages of the mentioned libraries need to be installed, too.

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