How To Generate Self Signed SSL Certificate Trusted by Modern Browsers - Quick Way!

December 30, 2018

In this tutorial we will generate self sign certificates that can be trusted by modern browsers in a quick way with help from cert-gen tool.

Get Tool

git clone https://github.com/devilbox/cert-gen

It’s up to you to have the tool install globally by executing sudo make install. But for me, it seems that it is not a common task i do every day, so use scripts from cloned repo directly is enough and makes more sense. These scripts are allocated in bin directory.

Generate Certificate Authority

./ca-gen -v -c VN -s HCMC -l HCMC -o "My Company" -u "IT Department" -n "Example App" app-root.key app-root-ca.crt

On MacOS, you may encounter error “Error Loading extension section v3_ca”. To fix that, use alternative openssl version instead:

brew install openssl
export PATH="/usr/local/opt/openssl/bin:$PATH"

Output

 0 drwxr-xr-x  6 viet  staff   192 Apr  5 15:30 .
 0 drwxr-xr-x  9 viet  staff   288 Apr  5 15:28 ..
 8 -rw-r--r--  1 viet  staff  1805 Apr  5 15:30 app-root-ca.crt
 8 -rw-r--r--  1 viet  staff  1675 Apr  5 15:30 app-root.key
16 -rwxr-xr-x  1 viet  staff  5045 Apr  5 15:28 ca-gen
16 -rwxr-xr-x  1 viet  staff  5896 Apr  5 15:28 cert-gen

Generate self signed SSL certificate

Generate and sign certificate for myapp.com domain and all of its subdomains.

./cert-gen -c VN -s HCMC -l HCMC \
-o "My Company" -u "IT Department" \
-n "myapp.com" -a "*.myapp.com" \
app-root.key app-root-ca.crt \
myapp.com.key myapp.com.csr myapp.com.crt

Output

 0 drwxr-xr-x  10 viet  staff   320 Apr  5 15:43 .
 0 drwxr-xr-x   9 viet  staff   288 Apr  5 15:28 ..
 8 -rw-r--r--   1 viet  staff  1805 Apr  5 15:30 app-root-ca.crt
 8 -rw-r--r--   1 viet  staff    17 Apr  5 15:44 app-root-ca.srl
 8 -rw-r--r--   1 viet  staff  1675 Apr  5 15:30 app-root.key
16 -rwxr-xr-x   1 viet  staff  5045 Apr  5 15:28 ca-gen
16 -rwxr-xr-x   1 viet  staff  5896 Apr  5 15:28 cert-gen
 8 -rw-r--r--   1 viet  staff  1371 Apr  5 15:44 myapp.com.crt
 8 -rw-r--r--   1 viet  staff  1009 Apr  5 15:44 myapp.com.csr
 8 -rw-r--r--   1 viet  staff  1700 Apr  5 15:44 myapp.com.key

myapp.com.crt and myapp.com.key are two files for server configuring to have secured setup.

Next step is to import app-root-ca.crt to browsers you want to test the certificate. Please refer to tutorial at https://github.com/devilbox/cert-gen#import-ca-into-chrome.

Written by Viet Pham.

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