{"id":57,"date":"2013-10-07T21:38:44","date_gmt":"2013-10-08T05:38:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cheapsslsecurity.com\/blog\/?p=57"},"modified":"2021-02-04T23:02:05","modified_gmt":"2021-02-05T07:02:05","slug":"easy-ssl-certificate-installation-guide-for-apache-server-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cheapsslsecurity.com\/blog\/easy-ssl-certificate-installation-guide-for-apache-server-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Easy SSL Certificate Installation Guide for Apache Server 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Quick tips to Install SSL Certificate on Apache Server 2<\/h2>\n

The Apache Foundation released its new version (Version 2) in 2002 following the overwhelming success of its first version. Version 2 mostly focused on further modularization of the development of the Apache core, but there were also several improvements including, Unix threading, IP version 6 support and most important of it all, it gave better support for Non-Unix platforms like Microsoft Windows.<\/p>\n

These powerful improvements have made Apache web server a number one choice to host over 100 million websites and web applications on the internet.<\/p>\n

\"apache<\/p>\n

If you have Apache 2.x installed already, then you’re good to go as you don’t need anything extra installed.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t installed it, then you can easily do so with our step-by-step guide:<\/p>\n

earth:~# apt-get install apache2\nReading Package Lists... Done\nBuilding Dependency Tree... Done\nThe following extra packages will be installed:\napache2-common apache2-mpm-worker apache2-utils cheapsslsecurityssl-cert\nSuggested packages:<\/strong>\napache2-doc ca-certificates\nThe following NEW packages will be installed:\napache2 apache2-common apache2-mpm-worker apache2-utils cheapsslsecurityssl-cert\n0 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.\nNeed to get 2040kB of archives.\nAfter unpacking 6218kB of additional disk space will be used.\nDo you want to continue? [Y\/n]<\/pre>\n
Once the server is installed you need to do three things to get a working SSL setup:<\/b><\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. Generate, or import a certificate<\/li>\n
  2. Enable Apache\u2019s SSL support<\/li>\n
  3. Configure your SSL options<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    Generating a Certificate<\/b><\/h2>\n
    <\/b>Generation of a certificate from scratch will protect the traffic exchanged between clients and your server; however, it will be signed by an untrustworthy certificate authority which will generate warnings.<\/p>\n
    Importing a paid and “trusted” certificate will avoid this problem, but that is beyond the scope of this simple introduction.<\/p>\n
    Generating SSL Certificate for Apache2 may be accomplished using the apache2-ssl-certificate script. This will create an interactive questionnaire followed by proper generation of the certificate file.<\/p>\n
    Illustration of the session:<\/b><\/h2>\n
    earth:~# apache2-ssl-certificate\ncreating selfsigned certificate\nreplace it with one signed by a certification authority (CA)\nenter your ServerName at the Common Name prompt\nIf you want your certificate to expire after x days call this programm\nwith -days x<\/pre>\n
    Generating a 1024 bit RSA private key\n............++++++\n..........................++++++\nwriting new private key to '\/etc\/apache2\/ssl\/apache.pem'\n-----<\/pre>\n
    Here you would be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request.<\/p>\n
    What you are about to enter is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.<\/p>\n
    There are quite a few fields to fill up, but you can leave some of them blank. For some fields, there will be a default value,<\/p>\n
    If you enter ‘.’, the field will be left blank.<\/p>\n
    —–<\/p>\n
    Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:\nState or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: Scotland\nLocality Name (eg, city) []: Edinburgh\nOrganization Name (eg, company; recommended) []: eThan Hunt\nOrganizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:\nserver name (eg. ssl.domain.tld; required!!!) []: eThan\nEmail Address []: ethan@domain.com<\/pre>\n
    Enabling SSL Support<\/b><\/h2>\n
    To use SSL facilities of Apache2 you must enable the module mod_ssl, this can be achieved using the helper tool a2enmod<\/p>\n
    As root run:<\/b><\/h2>\n
    earth:~# a2enmod ssl\nModule ssl installed; run \/etc\/init.d\/apache2 force-reload to enable.<\/pre>\n
    Once this is done you’ll have Apache setup to accept SSL connections, but the server will still only be listening for incoming HTTP requests on port 80 – and not SSL connections on port 443. To fix this you must add a line to the file \/etc\/apache2\/ports.conf:<\/p>\n
    Listen 443<\/pre>\n
    With these two steps out of the way you now have an Apache setup which will listen for and accept SSL connections. The next step is to modify your virtual host to use it.<\/span><\/p>\n
    Configuring your SSL Hosts<\/b><\/h2>\n
    With a certificate setup and the server updated to load and listen for incoming SSL connections, you’re almost done. The final step would be when your virtual hosts or main host accepts SSL options.<\/p>\n
    I use virtual hosts on my machine which means adding a couple of options to each one I wish to use the SSL for:<\/p>\n
    SSLEngine on\nSSLCertificateFile \/etc\/apache2\/ssl\/apache.pem<\/pre>\n
    For reference here is a complete example which should be easy to modify\/understand:<\/p>\n
    NameVirtualHost *:443\nNameVirtualHost *:80\n<VirtualHost *:80>\nServerNameeThan.my.flat\nDocumentRoot \/var\/www\/\nErrorLog \/var\/log\/apache2\/error.log\nCustomLog \/var\/log\/apache2\/access.log combined\n<\/VirtualHost>\n<VirtualHost *:443>\nServerNameeThan.my.flat\nDocumentRoot \/var\/www\/\nErrorLog \/var\/log\/apache2\/error.log\nCustomLog \/var\/log\/apache2\/access.log combined\nSSLEngine on\nSSLCertificateFile \/etc\/apache2\/ssl\/apache.pem\n<\/VirtualHost><\/pre>\n
    \n
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