OpenResty bundles Nginx and a set of Lua modules into one package, and when you need custom build options, installing from source is the standard route. This post records the complete steps for source-installing OpenResty 1.19.3.1 on the RHEL family (identical commands on CentOS 8 / Rocky 9), with the focus on pointing --with-openssl correctly — it wants the OpenSSL source directory, not the install directory; get this wrong and the build fails outright. Everything here was reproduced in a Rocky Linux 9.3 container: configure, make, install, startup, through to a curl 200.

Prerequisites

  • An RHEL 8/9-family server, root or sudo access (the tested environment here is a rockylinux:9.3 container).
  • The build toolchain: gcc, make, perl (OpenResty’s configure script is driven by perl).
  • Libraries: pcre-devel (required by the URL rewrite module), zlib-devel (gzip compression).
  • An OpenSSL source tarball (openssl-3.1.4 in this post), unpacked at any path, say /usr/local/src/openssl-3.1.4.

Step 1: Install Dependencies

1
dnf install gcc make perl pcre-devel zlib-devel wget -y

Verification point: rpm -q pcre-devel zlib-devel shows both packages present. Without pcre-devel, configure exits while checking the PCRE library — the tested error is shown in the “Common Errors” figure.

Step 2: Download and Unpack the Sources

Get the source tarball from the OpenResty download page:

1
2
3
4
wget https://openresty.org/download/openresty-1.19.3.1.tar.gz
tar -zxvf openresty-1.19.3.1.tar.gz
tar -zxvf openssl-3.1.4.tar.gz
cd openresty-1.19.3.1

Step 3: Configure and Build

1
2
3
4
./configure --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_v2_module \
  --with-openssl=/usr/local/src/openssl-3.1.4
make -j$(nproc)
make install

The semantics of --with-openssl deserve a special note: nginx (OpenResty included) will, at build time, treat the given directory as an OpenSSL source tree, compile it in place, and statically link it — so it must point to the unpacked source directory, not the directory produced by make install. If the install directory happens to lack a Makefile, the build fails at the OpenSSL step. Only if your habit is to unpack the OpenSSL source into /usr/local/openssl and compile it in place will the paths “coincidentally” agree.

Verification point: configure finishes with no ERROR and prints build hints at the tail. As tested (Rocky 9.3 container), the tail looks like this:

Figure 1

make ends and exits without errors; OpenResty builds LuaJIT, nginx, and all bundled modules in turn, taking a few minutes.

Step 4: Verify and Start

The install location is fixed at /usr/local/openresty/. Verify the version, then start and confirm the service is really responding:

1
2
3
/usr/local/openresty/nginx/sbin/nginx -v
/usr/local/openresty/nginx/sbin/nginx
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" http://127.0.0.1/

Figure 2

Two verification points: the version printed by nginx -v carries the openresty/ prefix, confirming it is OpenResty’s nginx rather than some other nginx that may exist on the system; and curl getting a 200 shows the service is truly up, not merely installed.

Common Errors

Missing PCRE: without pcre-devel, configure exits (exit 1) after three consecutive not found lines while checking the PCRE library, and the outer script reports the HTTP rewrite module requires the PCRE library.. Tested output:

Figure 3

Install pcre-devel and rerun configure — no cache clearing needed.

Wrong OpenSSL path: pointing --with-openssl at the install directory instead of the source directory fails the build at the OpenSSL step (verbatim record). Fix: point it at the source directory and rerun configure, make.

Uninstall and Rollback

Uninstalling a source install is simple: stop the process, then rm -rf /usr/local/openresty/ — no system directories polluted. That is one advantage of building from source over rpm installs: everything lives under one prefix directory, and rollback is clean.

Notes

  • --with-openssl must point to an OpenSSL source tree, statically compiled into nginx at build time; pointing it at the install directory is the most common failure point in articles of this kind.
  • Build OpenSSL itself per the official OpenSSL documentation; choose security-patch versions according to production requirements; verify the sha256 against the official site after downloading the source.
  • A source-installed OpenResty lives entirely under /usr/local/openresty/; start and stop with its own nginx binary (/usr/local/openresty/nginx/sbin/nginx -s stop|reload), and never mix in the system nginx.
  • For production, add a systemd unit to manage the OpenResty process instead of manual start/stop.
  • 1.19.3.1 is a 2020-era version line; new projects should use OpenResty’s official yum repo or a newer source release. The value of this post’s procedure is the act of “custom-building from source” itself — swap in the version you need.

This article was restructured from the author’s 2020-2024 CSDN blog posts, originally published on CSDN.