When I went to go install a copy of node.JS on OS X 10.6, I ran into a little snag. Using git, or more specifically Tower, I was able to pull node right from github.
The steps to install node are as simple as:
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
However, I was having problems at the ./configure stage. It was reporting:
Checking for openssl : not found
This resulted in a link error if one tries the make command.
Many of the web resources suggest installing libssl-dev, although being on OS X (and not Ubuntu) and having openssl already installed on my system, it turns out it was the detection mechanism and not a missing library that was the problem.
What I needed was the pkg-config package, because if it isn’t around, the configure step simply skips the check reporting openssl isn’t present.
To install it, I used Homebrew, a fantastic modern package manager that works exceptionally well with OS X.
All I needed to do was this step, and then the commands above.
$ brew install pkg-config
Node then worked like a champ.