How To Install or Update OpenSSL 3 on CentOS 8 Linux

OpenSSL is a robust, widely-used toolkit that provides support for the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, as well as a general-purpose cryptography library. Installing and maintaining the latest version of OpenSSL is essential for ensuring secure communication and data protection on your CentOS system.

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This tutorial goes through how to install OpenSSL 3+ on CentOS 8 Linux, since the yum repo only installs up to OpenSSL 1.1.1.

#The OpenSSL when installing from repo
openssl version
OpenSSL 1.1.1k  FIPS 25 Mar 2021

Before you begin

1. SSH to your Linux server with a sudo user then update the system then install the require packages:

sudo yum -y update
sudo yum install -y make gcc perl-core pcre-devel wget zlib-devel

2. Download the latest version of OpenSSL source code:

wget https://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-3.1.6.tar.gz

Configure, build and install OpenSSL

3. Uncompress the source file then changes to the OpenSSL directory:

sudo tar -xzvf openssl-3*.tar.gz
cd openssl-3*/

4. Configure the package for compilation, compile package then installs compiled package:

./config --prefix=/usr --openssldir=/etc/ssl --libdir=lib no-shared zlib-dynamic
sudo make -j ${nproc} 
sudo make test
sudo make install -j ${nproc} 

Export library path

5. Create environment variable file then doad the environment variable:

echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/lib64" >> /etc/profile.d/openssl.sh
source /etc/profile.d/openssl.sh

6. Finally, verify the OpenSSL version:

[root@ct7 ~]# openssl version
OpenSSL 3.1.1 30 May 2023 (Library: OpenSSL 3.1.1 30 May 2023)

Installation script

All above steps can be run automatically with the below bash script:

sudo yum -y update
sudo yum install -y make gcc perl-core pcre-devel wget zlib-devel
wget https://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-3.1.6.tar.gz
sudo tar -xzvf openssl-3*.tar.gz
cd openssl-3*/
./config --prefix=/usr --openssldir=/etc/ssl --libdir=lib no-shared zlib-dynamic
sudo make -j ${nproc} 
sudo make test
sudo make install -j ${nproc} 
echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/lib64" >> /etc/profile.d/openssl.sh
source /etc/profile.d/openssl.sh
openssl version

Create a bash script using your favorite text editor → make it executable then run it.

sudo nano installer.sh

sudo chmod +x installer.sh
./installer.sh

Direct installation bash script

Alternatively, we’ve created a bash script stored in GitHub. All you need to do are SSH to your server with a sudo account then run the following command:

sudo wget -qO - https://bonguides.com/linux/openssl3 | bash