How to install a ssl certificate on nginx

November 22, 2012 Servers, Tutorials

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How to install a ssl certificate on nginx

This is really a hassle when using nginx with https and your certificates uses bundle CA files (certificate authority).

The only directives that you’re given when installing the certificate is:

server {
	listen 443;
	server_name domain.com;
	ssl on;
	ssl_certificate /your/ssl/folder/domain_certificate.crt;
	ssl_certificate_key /your/ssl/folder/domain_certificate.key;
	 ...
}

server {

listen 443;

server_name domain.com;

ssl on;

ssl_certificate /your/ssl/folder/domain_certificate.crt;

ssl_certificate_key /your/ssl/folder/domain_certificate.key;

...

}

So as you can see, you only have those two directives, but nowadays certificates are soled cheap from a reseller which is using a bundle file for authorizing the certificate chain.

Not all users know that while this is confusing, it’s not really a problem.

Let’s say we have the bundle file named bundle_ca.crt which contains the CA certificate for your domain_certificate.crt . To be able to use the certificate, you need to combine these two certificates into a single one, by appending the CA file to the bottom of your domain_certificate.crt.

It is important that your domain_certificate.crt remains at the top of the certificate file!

To append or combine the two certificate, from command line you need to do:

cat domain_certificate.crt bundle_ca.crt &gt; domain_certificate_combined.crt

1	cat domain_certificate.crt bundle_ca.crt > domain_certificate_combined.crt

This will create for you domain_certificate_combined.crt which now can be used on your nginx virtualhost configuration:

server {
	listen 443;
	server_name domain.com;
	ssl on;
	ssl_certificate /your/ssl/folder/domain_certificate_combined.crt;
	ssl_certificate_key /your/ssl/folder/domain_certificate.key;
	 ...
}