SysAdmin's Journey

Quick and Easy Apache SSL on CentOS

Follow the jump to find out how you can quickly and easily setup your own SSL certificate and install it into Apache on CentOS/RHEL. First, we need to install the crypto-utils package, which gives us the super-handy genkey command.  We’ll also pull in mod_ssl at the same time: yum install crypto-utils mod_ssl

With that out of the way, let’s run genkey for our sample domain, www.mydomain.com: genkey –days=3650 www.mydomain.com

  1. Click Next
  2. Highlight “1024”, click Next
  3. Click No
  4. Fill in the form fields, making sure that the Common Name is the name you’ll be typing in your browser’s URL bar.  Click Next
  5. Don’t select “Encrypt the private key” unless you want to type in the passphrase every time you start Apache.  Click Next.

Now, we have our keys generated, we just need to tell Apache to use them.  Please note:The SSLCertificateFile changes the file extension from crtto cert! SSLCertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/www.mydomain.com.cert SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/pki/tls/private/www.mydomain.com.key

Restart Apache, and test it out!

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