Add https (ssl) support to your osx mac development machine with signed certificate

Rob — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:07:31 +0000

It became apparent that getting mod_ssl working correctly without browser warnings when developing sites that take payments is a bit of pain. Mainly because there is no free way to have a root authority sign your Certificate Signing Request (CSR).

There is how ever a short cut, given that you are using Apache, mod_ssl, openssl and Firefox.

We’re going to generate our own Certificate Authority (CA), this is CA is only going to work for us so if your generating a certificate for production, you’ll need to send your CSR to a proper CA such as VeriSign

Step1, Make a temporary folder we can work in.

cd ~/Desktop/ssltemp

Step2, generate our private key

openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024

You will be asked for a passphrase in the creation of this key. (just use 12345) or anything butdo not forget this passphrase! You’ll have to do this all over if you forget the passphrase. You will need this passphrase later on in the process.

Step3, generate a CSR from our private key

openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr

you’ll be asked for the following information:

Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]: (enter your country code here)
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]: (Enter your state here)
Locality Name (eg, city) []: (enter your city here)
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]: (enter something here)
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []: (enter something here)
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []: (this is the important one)
Email Address []: (your e-mail address)

Make sure you fill in `Common Name` with your domain you want this certificate for, this should match your apache vhost `ServerName` setting

Now, looking at the directory we’re working in, you should have the following:

[rob:~/Desktop/ssltemp] ls -la
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 5 rob staff 126 Nov 14 17:01 .
drwx------ 38 rob staff 1248 Nov 14 16:57 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 rob staff 729 Nov 14 17:01 server.csr
-rw-r--r-- 1 rob staff 963 Nov 14 16:59 server.key

Step4, create the private key for our CA

openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 1024

Again, you’ll be asked for a passphrase, which, again, you should not forget.

Step5, create CA certificate using the key we just made

openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -key ca.key -out ca.crt

You will be asked for similar information you were asked for when we make the web server certificate earlier; this information should be about you, enter something like the following

Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:GB
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:Cheshire
Locality Name (eg, city) []:Stockport
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:My CA
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:My CA for Dev
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:Rob Aldred
Email Address []:raldred@gmail.com

Now you will have 4 files your directory; server.key, server.csr, ca.key, ca.crt
Next is the important park, signing our certificate request.

The easiest way to do this is to use the sign.sh script contained in the mod_ssl source,
or you can get it here: sign.sh
copy the script to the working directory

Step6, make sign.sh executable and sign our CSR

chmod +x sign.sh
./sign.sh server.csr

you should get something like the following:

CA signing: server.csr -> server.crt:
Using configuration from ca.config
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Check that the request matches the signature
Signature ok
The Subjects Distinguished Name is as follows
countryName :PRINTABLE:'GB'
stateOrProvinceName :PRINTABLE:'Cheshire'
localityName :PRINTABLE:'Stockport'
organizationName :PRINTABLE:'Testing'
organizationalUnitName:PRINTABLE:'Testing'
commonName :PRINTABLE:'localhost'
emailAddress :IA5STRING:'raldred@gmail.com'
Certificate is to be certified until Nov 14 23:09:20 2010 GMT (365 days)
Sign the certificate? [y/n]:y

1 out of 1 certificate requests certified, commit? [y/n]y
Write out database with 1 new entries
Data Base Updated
CA verifying: server.crt <-> CA cert
server.crt: OK

Answer ‘y’ to the question asking to Sign the certificate [y/n]

Step7, remove password requirement from server key

cp server.key server.key.original
openssl rsa -in server.key.original -out server.key

you be asked for the passphase

Step8, copy files to our webserver

sudo mkdir /etc/apache2/certs
sudo cp -r * /etc/apache2/certs/

Step9, add the configuration to your VirtualHost block listening on the SSL port 443

SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile "/etc/apache2/certs/server.crt"
SSLCertificateKeyFile "/etc/apache2/certs/server.key"
SSLCACertificateFile "/etc/apache2/certs/ca.crt"

Step10, Tell apache to listen on 443
By default there is a file in /etc/apache2/extras called httpd-ssl.conf
this needs to edited and included in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf its commented out initially.

Depending where you are defining your VirtualHost blocks
Comment out or remove the _default_ virtualHost block in httpd-ssl.conf, this will cause errors when starting apache because we have no configured certificate for the example apache provites

Edit your httpd.conf to include the etc/httpd-ssl.conf file, scroll to the bottom the file, you’ll notice its commented out at around line #476

# Secure (SSL/TLS) connections
# Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

Just remove the # and move onto the next step

I use a seperate vhosts folder in extra, containing individual conf files for each virtualhost, they are included in the extra/httpd-vhosts.conf files using the following:

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/vhosts/*.conf

Step10, restart apache

sudo apachectl restart

Step11, (a few steps in itself) Add our CA to Firefox so it think its a trusted authority
Go to Preferences (Cmd + ,)
Go to Advanced
Go to Encryption
Click ‘View Certificates’
Choose the ‘Authorities’ tab
Click ‘Import’
Hit Shift + Cmd + g to open the go to folder window
Enter ‘/etc/apache2/certs’ (You might be asked to authenticate with your system password)
Select the ca.crt file we generated earlier and click ‘Open’
Firefox will ask you:
Do you want to trust “My CA” for the following purposes?
Just select Trust this CA to identify websites
Click ‘OK’
Restart your browser

If you’ve followed everything correctly when you go to https://localhost (or whatever CommonName you specified)
You will get a ssl encrypted site and no warnings about the certificate not being trusted.

Example showing a local vhost with a verified cert

If apache doesn’t come backup then apache’s config checks program is your best friend.

/usr/sbin/httpd -S

rob aldred » apache

Add https (ssl) support to your osx mac development machine with signed certificate