Installing your Certificate on Apache with mod_ssl

1. Extract all of the contents of the ZIP file that was sent to you and copy/move them to your server. The extracted contents will typically be named: yourDomainName.crt and yourDomainName.ca-bundle
   Move all of the certificate related files to their appropriate directories.

   A typical setup:

   1. Move the Private Key that was generated earlier to the ssl.key directory, which is typically found in /etc/ssl/. This must be a directory which only Apache can access.

1. Move the yourDomainName.crt and yourDomainName.ca-bundle to the ssl.crt directory, which is typically found in the /etc/ssl/ directory.

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What the Red Means

The lines that the user needs to enter or customize will be in red in this tutorial! The rest should mostly be copy-and-pastable.

About SSL Certificates

A SSL certificate is a way to encrypt a site’s information and create a more secure connection. Additionally, the certificate can show the virtual private server’s identification information to site visitors. Certificate Authorities can issue SSL certificates that verify the server’s details while a self-signed certificate has no 3rd party corroboration.

Set Up

The steps in this tutorial require the user to have root privileges on the VPS. You can see how to set that up here in steps 3 and 4.

Additionally, you need to have apache already installed and running on your virtual server. If this is not the case, you can download it with this command:

sudo apt-get install apache2

Step One—Activate the SSL Module

The next step is to enable SSL on the droplet.

sudo a2enmod ssl
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