Generate a CSR with OpenSSL

This article will go through the first step of creating and eventually installing an SSL certificate. You'll use the same steps whether you are getting a traditional SSL from an authority like Verisign, a self signed certificate or the '*' Wildcard certificate. Most of the information is taken from RapidSSL's support documentation, which is also a great place to buy a certificate. The Rackspace Cloud is not a certificate authority and does not resell SSL certificates so you will need to go to a third party solution and purchase a certificate using this certificate signing request (CSR).

Prerequisites

What you'll need first is to install Openssl on your server, this is a common package and will be available on all of the major distros through their package installer. Here is how you check to see if it is installed in a "Yum" style system:

# rpm -qa | grep -i openssl

The above command should return the following packages, or something similar:

openssl-0.9.8e-7.el5 openssl-0.9.8e-7.el5 openssl-devel-0.9.8e-7.el5

If it didn't you'll want to run the following:

# yum install openssl openssl-devel

Generate the RSA key

Create a RSA key for your Apache server, since every distro is different in where to place the certificates, we are just going to place it in an arbitrary spot:

# mkdir ~/domain.com.ssl/
    # cd ~/domain.com.ssl/

Type the following command to generate a private key.

# openssl genrsa -out domain.com.key 2048

Create a CSR

Type the following command to create a CSR with the RSA private key (output will be PEM format):

# openssl req -new -sha256 -key domain.com.key -out domain.com.csr

When creating a CSR you must follow these conventions. Enter the information to be displayed in the certificate. The following characters can not be used for the Organization Name or the Organizational Unit: < > ~ ! @ # $ % ^ * / \ ( ) ?.,&

DN Field	Explanation	Example
Common Name	The fully qualified domain name for your web server. This must be an exact match.	If you intend to secure the URL https://www.yourdomain.com, then your CSR's common name must be www.yourdomain.com. If you plan on getting a wildcard certificate make sure to prefix your domain with an asterisk, example: *.domain.com.
Organization	The exact legal name of your organization. Do not abbreviate your organization name.	domain.com
Organization Unit	Section of the organization	IT
City or Locality	The city where your organization is legally located.	Wellesley Hills
State or Province	The state or province where your organization is legally located. Can not be abbreviated.	Massachusetts
Country	The two-letter ISO abbreviation for your country.	US

Do not enter extra attributes at the prompt.

• Warning: Leave the challenge password blank (press enter)

Verify your CSR

# openssl req -noout -text -in domain.com.csr

Submit your CSR

From this point you have to take your CSR that you created here and submit it to a certificate authority. Ones that we recommend are going to be Verisign, Thawte and RapidSSL. There are also a number of other certificate authorities out there, shop around.

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