Self-signed certificate for testing

February 8th, 2016 at 02:32

In playing with service workers, I set up a self-signed SSL certificate for my local development environment. I used instructions from debian.org. It was very simple, since I didn’t need the security involved with a real operating site. Creating the certs took a single command:

openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out /path/to/server/config/certs/sitename.pem -keyout /path/to/server/config/certs/sitename.key

You then just need to set things up in the server configuration (Apache in my case). mod_ssl must be installed and enabled, which looks something like:

LoadModule ssl_module modules/mod_ssl.so

in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf or wherever your configuration is. The server must be told to listen on port 443, like:

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
    NameVirtualHost *:443
    Listen 443
</IfModule>

A virtual host must be created that has the same configuration as the HTTP virtual host, but with the port changed to 443 and 3 lines to enable the SSL certificate. One way to keep things DRY is to move the stuff that’s inside the virtual host into another file and include that in both virtual hosts:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    Include conf/site-partials/sitename.conf
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:443>
    Include conf/site-partials/sitename.conf
    SSLEngine On
    SSLCertificateFile "/path/to/server/config/certs/sitename.pem"
    SSLCertificateKeyFile "/path/to/server/config/certs/sitename.key"
</VirtualHost>

Restart Apache, and you will now be able to visit your virtual host over HTTPS. As with any self-signed cert, you will have to bypass a security warning, but that will be fine enough for testing purposes.

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