Support OpenSSL 3.0 for Alpine Linux

Update: as of prisma@4.8.0 (released on December 20th 2022), the procedure below is no longer needed, as Prisma now supports OpenSSL 3 on Linux Alpine out of the box.

Hey everyone, Alberto from Prisma here.

Prisma currently needs OpenSSL 1.1.x being installed as a system library on Linux Alpine. For many of you, Prisma suddenly stopped working when run on the node:alpine / node:lts-alpine Docker images. This is because these images are now based on alpine:3.17 (which comes with OpenSSL 3.0.x) rather than alpine:3.16 (which comes with OpenSSL 1.1.x).

You currently have two alternatives:

• Use a Node.js Docker image based on Alpine 3.16, like node:alpine3.16, node:lts-alpine3.16, node:18.12.1-alpine3.16 (encouraged)

• Install OpenSSL 1.1.x via the openssl1.1-compat package, e.g., by adding

  RUN apk add --update --no-cache openssl1.1-compat
  

  to your Dockerfile before installing Prisma

We’re also working on a solution on our side to provide native compatibility with OpenSSL 3, which will close this issue altogether. We thank you for your patience.

About the original error listed at the top of this issue:

Error: Unable to establish a connection to query-engine-node-api library. It seems there is a problem with your OpenSSL installation!
Details: Unable to require(`OMITTED/node_modules/prisma/libquery_engine-linux-musl.so.node`)
 Error loading shared library libssl.so.1.1: No such file or directory (needed by OMITTED/node_modules/prisma/libquery_engine-linux-musl.so.node)
[Context: getDmmf]

• The error Unable to establish a connection to query-engine-node-api library. It seems there is a problem with your OpenSSL installation! means that Prisma cannot interact with its own engines (which are compiled libraries or binaries compatible), most likely due to Prisma not being able to find OpenSSL on your system.
• The Error loading shared library libssl.so.1.1 error indeed shows that Prisma cannot find OpenSSL 1.1 in the system, which prevents commands like prisma generate and the Prisma Client from working as expected.

Here is a minimal Dockerfile example based on node:alpine you can use to run Prisma!

# Dockerfile for running Prisma on Linux Alpine 3.17+

# change with the Node.js version of your choice
ARG NODE_VERSION="18.12.1"

# change with the Linux Alpine version of your choice
ARG ALPINE_VERSION="3.17"

FROM node:${NODE_VERSION}-alpine${ALPINE_VERSION} AS base

# install OpenSSL 1.1.x, needed for Linux Alpine 3.17+
RUN apk update \
  && apk add openssl1.1-compat

ENV DATABASE_URL ""
WORKDIR /app

# install your project dependencies
COPY package.json ./
RUN npm i

# copy your project files and Prisma schema
COPY . ./

RUN npx prisma version

Notes:

• we recommend you to always pin Docker images to a specific version, to ensure reproducible builds
• we’ve noticed some comments in similar issues suggesting to install libc on Linux Alpine to fix the problem. Please DON’T do this, as it could cause other unexpected errors.

Support for OpenSSL 3 in Alpine Linux for x86_64 will be released today (CET) in Prisma 4.8.0. Please let us know if you still run into any issues with 4.8.0!