Due to some very specific reasons we need to build an application which bundles it's own openssl library together with certs, config files and engines. This means that we deploy a directory containing the main binary and a folder lib with the shared objects, among other, libssl and libcrypto. To make this application link correctly to the libraries in any directory we can of course set RPATH to $ORIGIN/lib.

The challenge we have is that during compilation of openssl we need to set the --prefix and --openssldir paths which of course is not known during compile time since these files are also bundled with the application.

./Configure shared --prefix=/library --openssldir=/lib

After this we can see that these paths gets hard coded into the library:

$ grep -nra /library/ ./lib/libcrypto.so
167534:/library/lib/ct_log_list.cnf
167649:OPENSSLDIR: "/library/lib"
167651:ENGINESDIR: "/library//lib/engines-1.1"
179919:/library//lib/engines-1.1
196978:/library/lib/private
196982:/library/lib
196986:/library/lib/certs
196988:/library/lib/cert.pem

The only way I have come up with so far that makes the library portable is to compile the library with a really long placeholder path (since the offsets in an elf-file are fixed) and then replace that string in the elf-files to the location of the application followed by trailing slashes to make the length of the strings the same before starting the application. I would hope there is a better way to this than editing the elf files.

./Configure shared --prefix=/$(printf "%0255d" 0) --openssldir=PLACEHOLDERDIR