I am working on a shared server without root access. I have spent hours to get openssl and libffi working with python on the server. I figured it out once, but then it broke because I moved the directories, so I decided to start it over. Here is the documentation I wrote for myself to set this up:

// Pthon3.8.2 setup on bluehost -currently libffi is still broken

mkdir install-workspaces
cd install-workspaces
mkdir openssl
cd openssl

wget https://ftp.openssl.org/source/old/1.1.1/openssl-1.1.1.tar.gz
tar xvf openssl-1.1.1.tar.gz
cd openssl-1.1.1

//in order to run  wsgi we might need to say "shared" instead of "no-shared"
./config --prefix=/home/user/local/lib/openssl --openssldir=/home/user/local/lib/openssl no-shared zlib-dynamic
make
make test
make install


cd ../../
mkdir libffi
cd libffi

wget ftp://sourceware.org/pub/libffi/libffi-3.2.1.tar.gz
tar xzf libffi-3.2.1.tar.gz
cd libffi-3.2.1

//I dont know if --disable-docs does anything, but I used the command and the install worked
./configure --prefix=/home/user/local/lib/libffi/ --disable-docs
make
make install


cd ../../
mkdir python
cd python

wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.8.2/Python-3.8.2.tar.xz
tar -xvf Python-3.8.2.tar.xz
cd Python-3.8.2

vim Modules/Setup

//press [i]
/* //remove the comments on the lines below and change the SSL= to be your openssl directory
SSL=/home/user/local/lib/openssl
_ssl _ssl.c \
-DUSE_SSL -I$(SSL)/include -I(SSL)/include/openssl \
-L$(SSL)/lib -lssl -lcrypto
*/
//press [esc] type ":wq" and press enter

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/user/local/lib/openssl/lib
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/user/local/lib/libffi/lib/pkgconfig

./configure --with-openssl=/home/user/local/lib/openssl --prefix="/home/user/local/lib/python" --enable-optimizations LDFLAGS='-L/home/user/local/lib/libffi/lib64 -R/home/user/local/lib/libffi/lib64' --enable-shared
make
make altinstall //<- important for _ctypes

Is there any way I can path to libssl.so.1.1 when using ./configure in python?