Installing the SSL Certificate on Apache

Once your server certificate has been received, copy this to a text editor such as Notepad, including the header and footer;

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----

DfzCCAugCAQAwgaMxCAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.....

-----END CERTIFICATE-----

Also ensure there are no white spaces, extra lines, breaks or additional characters in the copied text.

1. Save the certificate file as netcentral.crt (replacing netcentral with your chosen file name)
2. Copy the certificate to the Apache server directory in which you plan to store your certificates,
• /usr/local/apache/conf/ssl.crt
• /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.crt
3. Some instances of Apache will store Virtual Host information in a ssl.conf file. If your httpd.conf contains no Virtual Host information then you will need to locate and amend the ssl.conf as above.
4. Open the Apache httpd.conf in a text editor (Notepad), locate the SSL VirtualHost associated with your certificate and confirm they have two directories within the virtual host, if not please add them;
• SSLCertificateFile /usr/local/apache/conf/ssl.crt/domainname.crt
• SSLCertificateKeyFile /usr/local/apache/conf/ssl.key/domainname.key
5. Save the changes and exit the editor
6. Start/Restart the Apache Server

Additional information

Your httpd.conf should contain some or all of the following directives (for an IP based site). Those directives marked in bold are SSL related. Those directives marked in italics should only be used for troubleshooting.

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.1:443>
DocumentRoot /var/www/html
ServerName 192.168.1.98
ServerAdmin someone@your.domain
ErrorLog /etc/httpd/logs/ssl_error_log
TransferLog /etc/httpd/logs/ssl_access_log
SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.crt/domainname.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key/domainname.key
SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
</VirtualHost>