Generating SSL Key & CSR (tested on RHEL 7)

Just a note on generating a SSL key and csr (at the same time). This was tested on RHEL 7 for requesting a Comodo SSL certificate from SSLs.com.

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout domain.com.key -out domain.com.csr

The content of the CSR file will be needed to request a SSL certificate. I usually save this as “domain.com.crt” (received from Comodo as “domain_com.crt”). You can put together the bundle file with the other files you get from Comodo like this:

cat AddTrustExternalCARoot.crt COMODORSAAddTrustCA.crt COMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA.crt > domain.com.bundle

What you end up with is four files total:

  • domain.com.key
  • domain.com.csr
  • domain.com.crt
  • domain.com.bundle

The key, crt, and bundle files will be referenced in your Apache config. Something like this..

<VirtualHost *:443>
DocumentRoot /var/www/domain.com/web
ServerName domain.com
ServerAlias www.domain.com
...
<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
...
SSLCertificateFile /var/www/ssl/www.domain.com.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /var/www/ssl/www.domain.com.key
SSLCACertificateFile /var/www/ssl/www.domain.com.bundle
</IfModule>
...
</VirtualHost>

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