Installing your SSL Certificate

Copy the files in into the default locale

When you receive your SSL certificate from your authority, upload it to your server and place it in ~/domain.com.ssl/domain.com.crt

• Copy the certificate, key, and csr into the Apache server directory in which you plan to store your certificates (by default: /usr/local/apache/conf/ssl.crt/ or /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.crt/).

Note: Copy the entire contents of the certificate from (and including) the -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- and -----END CERTIFICATE----- lines.

Edit the httpd.conf

Open the Apache httpd.conf file in a text editor(I prefer VIM, the true editor).

Create the following Virtual Host:

<VirtualHost 123.45.67.89:443>
 ServerName www.domain.com
 DocumentRoot /path/to/your/document/root/htdocs
 
 SSLEngine ON
 SSLCertificateFile /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.crt/domain.com.crt
 SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key/domain.com.key
 
 ErrorLog logs/ssl.domain.com.error_log
 CustomLog logs/ssl.domain.com.access_log combined
 </VirtualHost>
 
 

• keep in mind that the paths to the certificate files will need to be changed to where ever you choose to ...

Prerequisites

What you'll need first is to install Openssl on your server, this is a common package and will be available on all of the major distros through their package installer. Here is how you check to see if it is installed in a "Yum" style system:

# rpm -qa | grep -i openssl
 

The above command should return the following packages, or something similar:

openssl-0.9.8e-7.el5 openssl-0.9.8e-7.el5 openssl-devel-0.9.8e-7.el5

If it didn't you'll want to run the following:

# yum install openssl openssl-devel
 

Generate the RSA key

Create a RSA key for your Apache server, since every distro is different in where to place the certificates, we are just going to place it in an arbitrary spot:

# mkdir ~/domain.com.ssl/
 # cd ~/domain.com.ssl/
 

Type the following command to generate a private key.

# openssl genrsa -out ~/domain.com.ssl/domain.com.key 2048
 

Create a CSR ...