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Self-Signed Certs for Apache in FreeBSD

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The following procedure shows how to apply self-signed certificates to the Apache web server in FreeBSD.

After creating and installing the TLS/SSL certificate/key pair, they can be utilized to secure FreeBSD web services with encryption during the development and testing process. It is important to keep in mind that self-signing may be deemed UNTRUSTWORTHY in a production environment.

==========

1. Log in to "root". Regular users must be part of the "wheel" group in order to do this.

user@host: $ su -

2. Go to the directory containing the Apache site configuration files.

root@host: # cd /usr/local/etc/apache24/extra

3. BACK UP the default HTTPS configuration file for the secure site.

root@host: # cp httpd-ssl.conf httpd-ssl-conf.back

4. Open the default HTTPS configuration file.

root@host: # ee httpd-ssl.conf

5. Find and modify the following Apache directives.

# BEGIN CODE
# ...

SSLCertificateFile "/usr/local/etc/apache24/server.crt"
# The self-signed certificate.

SSLCertificateKeyFile "/usr/local/etc/apache24/server.key"
# The key for the self-signed certificate.

# ...
# END CODE

6. Restart the web server.

root@host: # service apache24 restart

7. Log out from "root".

root@host: # exit

==========

For Debian-based Linux distributions, the process is similar but some file paths and commands are different as shown here.

==========

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