Most of my domains are registered with Namecheap, and powered by Nginx. The site you are viewing now is one such example. Currently with Namecheap, domain registrations, hosting, transfers and WhoIS protection come with a free PositiveSSL subscription (course even if they eventually stop that special, 9.95/year is still a good price for a PositiveSSL certificate). This section will show you how to generate a certificate request with OpenSSL and how to install the provided certificate into Nginx.

Most hosting providers that allow you to install a SSL certificate will normally be using a Cpanel/WHM setup with the Apache Webserver. In which case SSL installation can be quite and visually straight forward, as its pretty much cut and paste back an forth. While you don’t get this luxery with Nginx, its not that difficult to configure.

What you will need on the server:

A unique IP address. The domain you are getting the certificate for does not have the be the only domain served on the chosen IP address. However Nginx will only serve one certificate per IP. An attempt to install two certificates on the same IP will result in the latter domain serving the previous domain’s certificate.

SSH access. Otherwise known as ‘shell access’, would be required to perform most of the tasks yourself. If you have installed Nginx onto a remote server yourself, then chances are you have shell access. Also if you’re running Nginx you’re not likely using shared hosting, which is normally void of shell access.

OpenSSL In order to actually generate a request and serve the certificate you will need OpenSSL installed. Using a repository such as yum on CentOS you can install this with the package openssl and openssl-devel (depending on the repository the package names could vary).

Nginx webserver configured with SSL. In order for Nginx to serve SSL certificates, Nginx must be built with the option –with-http_ssl_module. To verify you can run nginx -V from the terminal to see all the options your current release was built with. If you installed Nginx from a repository, you may need to see if there exists a SSL variation. KBeezie.com is currently running on Nginx 1.0 and hosted by IonVz.

Assuming you have all the above in place, we can start by creating private key followed by the CSR file otherwise known as a Certificate Signing Request.