R Consulting Appliance Configuration, HTTPS

R Consulting

Apply all necessary steps from R Consulting Appliances Installation, Initial configuration and respective role checklists first.

nginx HTTPS configuration checklist

  1. Create a PEM certificate nginx can use. Having a certificate file (usually .crt), certificate authority bundle (usually .pem or .ca.pem) and a password-unprotected private key (usually .key file), concatenate them with the following command:

    $ cat cert.crt ca-bundle.pem private.key > host.domain.tld.pem

  2. Copy certificate to /usr/local/etc/nginx.

  3. Create /usr/local/etc/nginx/local.conf.ssl.conf with the following contents:

        ssl_certificate     host.domain.tld.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key host.domain.tld.pem;

  4. Create /usr/local/etc/nginx/rcons.public.ssl.conf with the following contents:

            listen       443 ssl;
        server_name  host.domain.tld;

  5. Test configuration with nginx -t and fix any issues found. Use nginx -tT | less to display post-processed, albeit not in-order, configuration.

  6. Apply new configuration with service nginx restart.

Extracting certificate and private key from a .pfx file

Keep password close then run

openssl pkcs12 -in file.pfx -clcerts -nokeys -out host.domain.tld.crt
openssl pkcs12 -in file.pfx -nocerts -nodes  -out host.domain.tld.key

Creating a .pfx file

openssl pkcs12 -export -out file.pfx -inkey fqdn.key -in fqdn.crt -certfile ca-bundle.pem

Querying certificate name & expiry

openssl x509 -noout -text -in file.pem | grep 'Subject:\|Not Before:\|Not After :'

Resources