It seems that I borked xcode, did something bad with my libssl, or just that my system’s too out of date to trivially install, homebrew or build NodeJS. I really want to install Node, so here’s what I just did.

I started off downloading and extracting the latest NodeJS source tarball (0.4.2 at time of writing). After attempting to configure and build, I was getting some complaints out of make:

I was getting some complaints out of make:

../src/node_crypto.cc: In function ‘void node::crypto::InitCrypto(v8::Handle<v8::object>)’:
../src/node_crypto.cc:2917: error: ‘SSL_COMP_get_compression_methods’ was not declared in this scope
Waf: Leaving directory `/Users/Ian/node-latest-install/build'
Build failed:  -> task failed (err #1): 
    {task: cxx node_crypto.cc -> node_crypto_4.o}

After a helpful tweek from @tonymilne I looked at the output of ./configure slightly more closely: whilst it reported it found header openssl/crypto.h, it said that openssl was not found.

Getting an updated version of OpenSSL was pretty easy with homebrew:

brew create http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8r.tar.gz
brew install openssl

It didn’t quite fully install though. It told me “This formula is keg-only, so it was not symlinked into /usr/local”, and that

If you build your own software and it requires this formula, you'll need
to add its lib & include paths to your build variables:

  LDFLAGS: -L/usr/local/Cellar/openssl/0.9.8r/lib
  CPPFLAGS: -I/usr/local/Cellar/openssl/0.9.8r/include

Turns out that similar but different problems were solved by setting options with configure, and running ./configure --help in the folder with the NodeJS source shows some pertinent options. I tried

./configure --prefix=~/local --openssl-includes=/usr/local/Cellar/openssl/0.9.8r/include  --openssl-libpath=/usr/local/Cellar/openssl/0.9.8r/lib

and it seems like it was successful – node --vars includes -DHAVESSL=1.