Configure a site with SSL on an Nginx server

This post describes how to setup a server block on nginx with a Thawte SSL123 certificate.

This how to can of course also be used with other SSL vendors (comodo, digicert, …) but you’ll have to change some steps of course 🙂

First, we’ll start with the certificate request.

To create your request, use the openssl command:

openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout www.securedomain.com.pem -out www.securedomain.com.csr

And follow the SSL csr generation process:

Generating a 2048 bit RSA private key
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writing new private key to 'www.securedomain.com.pem'
-----
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:BE
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:VL
Locality Name (eg, city) []:Brussels
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:IT Company Name
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:IT Dpt
Common Name (e.g. server FQDN or YOUR name) []:www.securedomain.com
Email Address []:it@securedomain.com

Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:

Now, if you look inside of your CSR files, you’ll see something like

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----
...
...
...
-----END CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----

Now it’s time to go and buy your certificate at your favorite SSL reseller…

Be sure to have a mailbox to be able to send your certificate approval email to (mainly this is: admin@securedomain.com or webmaster@, hostmaster@, administrator@,…)

Once you have received your SSL Certificate from Thawte, create a new file and paste in the certificate.

So paste it inside of www.securedomain.com.crt

Thawte has upgraded their root hierarchy to 2048bit RSA Keys (more information),  so you need the Intermediate CA to support old web browsers. For the nginx web server you can download the file from Thawte here by:

wget https://search.thawte.com/library/VERISIGN/ALL_OTHER/thawte%20ca/SSL123_CA_Bundle.pem

One you have this file, echo the contents and paste it at the end of your crt file.

cat SSL123_CA_Bundle.pem >>  www.securedomein.com.crt

Now enable SSL in your nginx server block by:

server {
  listen 80;
  listen 443 default ssl;

  ssl_certificate     /var/www/www.securedomain.com/ssl/www.securedomain.com.crt;
  ssl_certificate_key /var/www/www.securedomain.com/ssl/www.securedomain.com.pem;

  server_name     www.securedomain.com
                  ;

  root   /var/www/www.securedomain.com/wwwroot;

  index   index.php index.html;

...

In my example, your site will listen to both Port 80 and 443 (SSL), you can of course redirect http to https by adding this in your nginx server block config:

###Add Redirect SSL
server {
  listen   80;

  server_name securedomain.com
              www.securedomain.com;

			   rewrite ^ https://www.securedomain.com$request_uri? permanent;
}
### End Redirect to SSL
server {
  listen 443 default ssl;

  ssl_certificate     /var/www/www.securedomain.com/ssl/www.securedomain.com.crt;
  ssl_certificate_key /var/www/www.securedomain.com/ssl/www.securedomain.com.pem;

  server_name     www.securedomain.com
                  ;

  root   /var/www/www.securedomain.com/wwwroot;

  index   index.php index.html;

  ...
  ...