OpenSSL on Windows – Compile and Install from Source

OpenSSL is a Cryptography and SSL/TLS toolkit, very popular piece of software. Despite there are built and packaged options for installation, I prefer to compile from latest available stable source repository.

There are some pre-requisites that can be found in those other posts:

• Git client at Git client and configuration for accessing private repositories via SSH in GitHub.com
• Visual Studio Build Tools at Visual Studio Build Tools
• Perl at Strawberry Perl
• Nasm at Nasm Installation

The OpenSSL repository in GitHub.com is available at openssl/openssl: TLS/SSL and crypto library (github.com)

There are 2 main versions, 1.X and 3.X. I ned to use 1.X most of the time, so to stick to this version I move to my local workspace and clone it.

Note: For Windows build of OpenSSL we use Visual Studio Command Prompt. For Windows 64-bit use x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2022.

Navigate to your workspace folder and then:

git clone https://github.com/openssl/openssl.git
cd openssl
git checkout OpenSSL_1_1_1-stable

To configure the build tool for Windows 64-bit, execute:

perl Configure VC-WIN64A

To compile, use:

nmake

Then, to install:

nmake install

Once the process is complete, see screenshot below, you can include an extra step to add it to PATH environment variable as described at Windows 11 – Environment variables and the Path

Now, OpenSSL is available and to moving to latest version is just a matter of select later commits in the repository and repeat those steps.