SSL Certificate is used to convert your website from http:// to https://. The protocol was created by Netscape to ensure secure transactions between web servers and browsers. It uses a third party, a Certificate Authority (CA), to identify one end or both end of the transactions. In this article, we explain how to generate private key file (server.key), certificate signing request file (server.csr) and webserver certificate file (server.crt) that can be used on Apache server with mod_ssl. For the sake of example we will be using www.my-server.org as our domain.

One of the first tasks a server administrator will have to perform to setup a web server is to install apache with mysql and php support (LAMP – Linux Apache Mysql Php). In this tutorial we will use the hostname server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.1. These settings might differ for you, so you replace them where appropriate.