That’s How We Get Socks?

I didn’t know there was a server that made socks.

This morning I noticed the sock drawer was empty, as my wife handed me a pair of some very low-cut socks.

“I know you don’t like these for work, but they’ll have to do. I need to get your socks back online.”

“Back online?”

“Sorry, I meant I have to do laundry. Guess, you’re rubbing off on me.”

Installing node.JS on OS X 10.6

Having problems installing Node.JS because of missing OpenSSL problems? Here’s the solution to that problem for OS X.

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.