This tutorial will show you how to acquire and install an SSL certificate from a trusted, commercial Certificate Authority (CA). SSL certificates allow web servers to encrypt their traffic, and also offer a mechanism to validate server identities to their visitors. Websites using SSL are accessed via the https://
protocol.
Before the mid-2010s, many smaller websites did not always use SSL or HTTPS. Since then, expectations of security have increased, and the Let’s Encrypt project was created to provide free, trusted SSL certificates at scale, allowing almost everyone to use HTTPS as needed.
However, there are some limitations to Let’s Encrypt’s certificates. They expire every 3 months, typically requiring you to have a functioning auto-renewal script in place, and can be awkward to use in environments where this is not possible. Let’s Encrypt also does not provide Extended Validation certificates which validate the legal ownership of your web presence, or Wildcard Certificates that will automatically match every possible subdomain of your website (such as shop.example.com) without you having to register each of them manually.
For most users, these will not be significant limitations. Let’s Encrypt is a popular option for many personal and commercial websites. However, if you have particular enterprise software requirements, or a very large commercial operation, you should consider purchasing a certificate from a commercial CA.
This tutorial covers how to select and deploy an SSL certificate from a trusted certificate authority. After you have acquired your SSL certificate, this tutorial will cover installing it on the Nginx and Apache web servers.
There are several prerequisites to attempting to obtain an SSL certificate from a commercial CA:
A registered domain name. This tutorial will use example.com
throughout. You can purchase a domain name from Namecheap, get one for free with Freenom, or use the domain registrar of your choice.
Access to one of the email addresses on your domain’s WHOIS record or to an “admin type” email address at the domain itself. Certificate authorities that issue SSL certificates will typically validate domain control by sending a validation email to one of the addresses on the domain’s WHOIS record, or to a generic admin email address at the domain itself. To be issued an Extended Validation certificate, you will also be required to provide the CA with paperwork to establish the legal identity of the website’s owner, among other things.
DNS records set up for your server. If you are using DigitalOcean, please see our DNS documentation for details on how to add them.
This tutorial will provide configuration instructions for a Ubuntu 22.04 server set up by following this initial server setup for Ubuntu 22.04 tutorial, including a sudo-enabled non-root user and a firewall. Most modern Linux flavors will work similarly.
You should also have a web server like Nginx or Apache installed, following How To Install Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04 or How To Install the Apache Web Server on Ubuntu 22.04. Be sure that you have a server block (or Apache virtual host) for your domain.
If you are not sure which Certificate Authority to use, there are a few factors to consider.
The most crucial point is that the CA that you choose is a member of the root certificate programs of the most commonly used operating systems and web browsers, i.e. it is a “trusted” CA, and its root certificate is trusted by common browsers and other software. If your website’s SSL certificate is signed by a trusted CA, its identity is considered to be valid by software that trusts the CA.
Most commercial CAs that you will encounter will be members of the common root CA programs, but it does not hurt to check before making your certificate purchase. For example, Apple publishes its list of trusted SSL root certificates.
Ensure that you choose a CA that offers the certificate type that you require. Many CAs offer variations of these certificate types under a variety of names and pricing structures. Here is a short description of each type:
example.com
. Note that additional subdomains, such as www.example.com
, are not included*.example.com
can also be used for www.example.com
and store.example.com
example.com
, www.example.com
, and example.net
In addition to the aforementioned certificate types, there are different levels of validations that CAs offer:
Many CAs offer a large variety of “bonus” features to differentiate themselves from the rest of the SSL certificate-issuing vendors. Some of these features can end up saving you money, so it is important that you weigh your needs against the offerings before making a purchase. Example of features to look out for include free certificate reissues or a single domain-priced certificate that works for www.
and the domain basename, e.g. www.example.com
with a SAN of example.com
After you have your prerequisites sorted, and you know the type of certificate you need, it’s time to generate a certificate signing request (CSR) and private key.
If you are planning on using Apache HTTP or Nginx as your web server, you can use the openssl
command to generate your private key and CSR on your web server. In this tutorial, you can keep all of the relevant files in your home directory, but feel free to store them in any secure location on your server:
To generate a private key, called example.com.key
, and a CSR, called example.com.csr
, run this command (replace the example.com
with the name of your domain):
- openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout example.com.key -out example.com.csr
At this point, you will be prompted for several lines of information that will be included in your certificate request. The most important part is the Common Name
field, which should match the name that you want to use your certificate with – for example, example.com
, www.example.com
, or (for a wildcard certificate request) *.example.com
. If you are planning on getting an OV or EV certificate, ensure that all of the other fields accurately reflect your organization or business details. Providing a “challenge password” is not necessary.
For example:
OutputCountry Name (2 letter code) [AU]:US
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:New York
Locality Name (eg, city) []:New York
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:My Company
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (e.g. server FQDN or YOUR name) []:example.com
Email Address []:sammy@example.com
Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:
This will generate a .key
and .csr
file. The .key
file is your private key, and should be kept secure. The .csr
file is what you will send to the CA to request your SSL certificate.
- ls example.com*
Outputexample.com.csr example.com.key
You will need to copy and paste your CSR when submitting your certificate request to your CA. To print the contents of your CSR, use cat
:
cat example.com.csr
Now you are ready to buy a certificate from a CA.
There are many commercial CA providers, and you can compare and contrast the most appropriate options for your own setup. For example, Namecheap acts as an SSL certificate reseller, and has changed upstream CA providers in the past to provide the best value. Currently, they offer certificates from Comodo CA. Here is a sample of their offerings as of December 2022:
After making a selection, you will need to upload the CSR that you generated in the previous step. Your CA provider will also likely have an “Approver” step, which will send a validation request email to an address in your domain’s WHOIS record or to an administrator type address of the domain that you are getting a certificate for.
After approving the certificate, the certificate will be emailed to the named administrator. Copy and save them to your server in the same location that you generated your private key and CSR. Name the certificate with the domain name and a .crt
extension, e.g. example.com.crt
, and name the intermediate certificate intermediate.crt
.
The certificate is now ready to be installed on your web server, but first, you may have to make some changes to your firewall.
If you have the ufw
firewall enabled as recommended by our Ubuntu 22.04 setup guide, you’ll need to adjust the settings to allow for HTTPS traffic. Nginx and Apache both register a few profiles with ufw
upon installation.
You can see the current setting by typing:
- sudo ufw status
If you receive output containing just Nginx HTTP
or Apache
, only HTTP traffic is allowed to the web server:
OutputStatus: active
To Action From
-- ------ ----
OpenSSH ALLOW Anywhere
Nginx HTTP ALLOW Anywhere
OpenSSH (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)
Nginx HTTP (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)
To additionally let in HTTPS traffic, allow the Nginx Full
or Apache
Full` profile and delete the redundant HTTP profile allowance:
- sudo ufw allow 'Nginx Full'
- sudo ufw delete allow 'Nginx HTTP'
That should produce a result like this:
- sudo ufw status
OutputStatus: active
To Action From
-- ------ ----
OpenSSH ALLOW Anywhere
Nginx Full ALLOW Anywhere
OpenSSH (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)
Nginx Full (v6) ALLOW Anywhere (v6)
In the final step, you’ll install the certificate.
After acquiring your certificate from the CA of your choice, you need to install it on your web server. This involves adding a few SSL-related lines to your web server software configuration.
This tutorial will cover configuring Nginx and Apache on Ubuntu 22.04, but most modern Linux flavors will work similarly. This tutorial also makes these assumptions:
/home/sammy
example.com.key
example.com.crt
intermediate.crt
Note: In a production environment, these files should be stored somewhere that only the web server process (usually root
) can access, and the private key should be kept secure. For example, Let’s Encrypt stores the certificates it generates in /etc/letsencrypt
. Production examples will vary due to the complexity of multi-server configurations.
These are the steps to manually deploy an SSL certificate on Nginx.
If your CA returned only an intermediate certificate, you must create a single “chained” certificate file that contains your certificate and the CA’s intermediate certificates.
Assuming your certificate file is called example.com.crt
, you can use the cat
command to append files together to create a combined file called example.com.chained.crt
:
- cat example.com.crt intermediate.crt > example.com.chained.crt
Using nano
or your favorite text editor, open your default Nginx server block file for editing:
- sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
Find the listen
directive, and modify it to listen 443 ssl
:
…
server {
listen 443 ssl;
…
Next, find the server_name
directive within that same server block, and make sure that its value matches the common name of your certificate. Also, add the ssl_certificate
and ssl_certificate_key
directives to specify the paths of your certificate and private key files:
…
server_name example.com;
ssl_certificate /home/sammy/example.com.chained.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /home/sammy/example.com.key;
…
To allow only the most secure SSL protocols and ciphers, add the following lines to the file:
…
ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
ssl_ciphers 'EECDH+AESGCM:EDH+AESGCM:AES256+EECDH:AES256+EDH';
…
Finally, to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS by default, you can add an additional server block at the top of the file:
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
rewrite ^/(.*) https://example.com/$1 permanent;
}
…
Save and close the file. If you are using nano
, press Ctrl+X
, then when prompted, Y
and then Enter.
Before restarting Nginx, you can validate your configuration by using nginx -t
:
- sudo nginx -t
If there aren’t any problems, restart Nginx to enable SSL over HTTPS:
- sudo systemctl restart nginx
Test it out by accessing your site via HTTPS, e.g. https://example.com
. You will also want to try connecting via HTTP, e.g. http://example.com
to ensure that the redirect is working properly.
These are the steps to manually deploy an SSL certificate on Apache.
Using nano
or your favorite text editor, open your default Apache virtual host file for editing:
- sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
Find the <VirtualHost *:80>
entry and modify it so your web server will listen on port 443
:
…
<VirtualHost *:443>
…
Next, add the ServerName
directive, if it doesn’t already exist:
…
ServerName example.com
…
Then add the following lines to specify your certificate and key paths:
…
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /home/sammy/example.com.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /home/sammy/example.com.key
SSLCACertificateFile /home/sammy/intermediate.crt
…
At this point, your server is configured to listen on HTTPS only (port 443), so requests to HTTP (port 80) will not be served. To redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS, add the following to the top of the file (substitute the name in both places):
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example.com
Redirect permanent / https://example.com/
</VirtualHost>
…
Save and close the file. If you are using nano
, press Ctrl+X
, then when prompted, Y
and then Enter.
Enable the Apache SSL module by running this command:
- sudo a2enmod ssl
Now, restart Apache to load the new configuration and enable TLS/SSL over HTTPS.
- sudo systemctl restart apache2
Test it out by accessing your site via HTTPS, e.g. https://example.com
. You will also want to try connecting via HTTP, e.g. http://example.com
to ensure that the redirect is working properly.
In this tutorial, you learned how to determine when you might need to purchase an SSL certificate from a commercial CA, and how to compare and contrast the available options. You also learned how to configure Nginx or Apache for HTTPS support, and how to adapt their configurations for production.
Next, you may want to read about other SSL use cases, such as when working with load balancers.
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HI there, thank you for this great article… when my ssl-provider issued my ssl certification i got with the certification two more files, first : COMODORSAAddTrustCA, second : COMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA
but in your article you did’t mention anything about those more certifications, so can you give me some explanation about those more certifications ? where would i use them ?
Best regards
Thanks for the great tutorial. I just set this up on my server using Namecheap’s SSL certificate but there was a major disconnect in the article for me. I wasn’t able to complete the installation without referring to other sources. Hopefully this comment will help others with the same issue and get the author to modify the original article.
With Namecheap, I received two files/keys, but it was unclear to me which file is the ‘site certificate’ and which is the one to be renamed to ‘intermediate.crt’. In hindsight it seems obvious but when going through the tutorial I got stuck.
In the downloaded package from Namecheap, one file is in the form of *.crt and the other *.ca-bundle. *The .crt file is the ‘site certificate’, and the .ca-bundle file is the ‘CA intermediate certificate’, which should be renamed to ‘intermediate.crt’.
When you combine the site certificate (.crt file) and the intermediate certificate (.ca-bundle file), in that order, you create the chained certificate (.chained.crt file), which can be used in conjunction with the private key (created in the beginning) to serve the site with Nginx.
Don’t forget you may have previously used iptables to lock down your server. After setting up the SSL and then getting a timeout with no errors in the logs;
In Ubuntu sudo ufw allow 443
A couple of good resources to test the certificate is all ‘clean & green’ :
https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html https://www.whynopadlock.com
These will spot any problems with your SSL chain, and the last link will also identify non secure content.
Thanks for this great article and all the comments!
I wanted to share some tips and trouble shooting techniques:
Check that the SSL.crt and mydomain.key are owned by root. Make sure to protect your private key
chmod 600 mydomain.key
Contact Support
Is the SSL certificate installed?
openssl s_client -CApath /etc/ssl/ -showcerts -connect mydomain.com:443 -servername mydomain.com
What webserver am I running?
wget --save-headers mydomain.com
What port is nginx listening on?
netstat -tulpn | grep "nginx"
Open up the 443 port:
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
Worked perfectly for me. I had absolutely no problems installing a wildcard SSL certificate from NameCheap on my Ubuntu 13.10 Apache 2.4.6 droplet.
Thanks Mitch
Not sure where to begin to be honest. I am using a WordPress droplet with Apache and Ubuntu 14.04. I have a Comodo SSL certificate with a .crt file and .bundle file. I followed the instructions, making adjustments to the naming. I tried the instructions here regarding the default conf file and I tried the instructions from Comodo at https://support.comodo.com/index.php?/Default/Knowledgebase/Article/View/637/37/ for Apache & mod_ssl.
I have keys and crt and bundle files in both /home/myusername/ and in the /etc/ssl/ directory
My modified 000-default.conf features the following:
I added the Listen command after seeing it on a Ubuntu forum.
I get the following error in Firefox when I try to connect via https://www.digitera.com
In the comments section, Mitchell mentioned the default-ssl.conf file, but that is not part of the core tutorial.
Which instructions should I be following ? The instructions from Comodo, the ones here ? Should I be modyifying just the 000-default.conf file or the default-ssl.conf one as well ? Should I be leaving the .bundle file name alone or should I rename it to match the convention that is indicated in the base tutorial ?
Help !!!
Ken
Hi I’m trying to setup a SSL cert and getting this error:
SSL_CTX_use_PrivateKey_file(“/home///example.com.key”) failed (SSL: error:0B080074:x509 certificate routines:X509_check_private_key:key values mismatch)
Very comprehensive guide, thanks.
One command that helped me debug was:
That tests your config to make sure it is valid and will report any errors.