You'll know if you need ssl support compiled into your python installation if you get the following exception message: AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'ssl'

In order to make that go away so you can continue happily slinging python code, you'll need to first make sure you have OpenSSL installed. By default it is installed from source at: /usr/local/ssl

If that directory doesn't exist, then grab the source package.

Do the standard:

tar zxf openssl-0.9.8g.tar.gz
cd openssl-0.9.8g
./config
make
make install

Then grab the python sources for 2.5.1 and: tar zxf Python-2.5.1.tgz && cd Python-2.5.1

Then you need to edit the Modules/Setup.dist:

204:# Socket module helper for SSL support; you must comment out the other
205:# socket line above, and possibly edit the SSL variable:
206:SSL=/usr/local/ssl
207:_ssl _ssl.c \
208:    -DUSE_SSL -I$(SSL)/include -I$(SSL)/include/openssl \
209:    -L$(SSL)/lib -lssl -lcrypto</pre>

If you installed OpenSSL in the default locations you can just uncomment lines 206-209, then:

./configure
make
make install</pre>

Then verify your installation with:

python /usr/local/lib/python2.5/test/test_socket_ssl.py
test_rude_shutdown ...
test_basic ...
test_timeout ...