Quick & 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 crt to 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!