Electro Sparrow

Hello all,

So you just got a Comodo Positive SSL or any other certificate for your amazing website? You are probably wondering how you can make it work with Nginx. This a post to explain some of those configurations.

We’ll start by guessing that you either generated a private key, or the place you bought the certificate from did it for you. Either way, you should have:

• a file with the private key. We’ll call this file privkey.pem
• One or more certificate files:
  • a .pem file, that we’ll call fullchain.pem
  • 2, 3 or 4 .crt files, that we’ll call AddTrustExternalCARoot.crt, COMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA.crt, COMODORSAAddTrustCA.crt and YourDomain.crt.

The way Nginx works (and Apache, for what’s worth), is that we must have a certificate file, and an optional private key file. The .pem file is nothing more than a file with the content of the .crt files inside. So, if you already have a .pem file, you already have the first step done. If you don’t, you need to create one. For that, we need to cat the .crt files content, from the lesser “authority” to the biggest, starting with your domain. For that, we do something like this:

cat YourDomain.crt COMODORSADomainValidationSecureServerCA.crt COMODORSAAddTrustCA.crt AddTrustExternalCARoot.crt > fullchain.pem

Once you do this, you’ll have your pem file! Continue reading →