Introduction

Adding security to your website is important. In this guide, we’ll see how to create and insert SSL certificates in Lighttpd.

Installation

We only need OpenSSL:

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apt-get install openssl

Configuration

Generating SSL keys

Let’s create an ssl directory in the Lighttpd configuration folder, then generate the certificates:

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mkdir /etc/lighttpd/ssl
openssl req -new -x509 -keyout /etc/lighttpd/ssl/selfcert.pem -out /etc/lighttpd/ssl/selfcert.pem -days 3650 -nodes
  • selfcert.pem: use the name that interests you (e.g., deimos.fr.pem)
  • 3650: number of days the certificate is valid (10 years, we’re safe for a good while)

Lighttpd

Let’s enable the SSL module for Lighttpd:

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lighty-enable-mod ssl

Then let’s modify the SSL configuration file so it takes our new certificate into account (/etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-ssl.conf):

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$SERVER["socket"] == "0.0.0.0:443" {
                 ssl.engine                  = "enable"
                 ssl.pemfile                 = "/etc/lighttpd/ssl/deimos.fr.pem"
}

And that’s it! All you need to do now is restart Lighttpd, and port 443 will be open with your certificate activated :-)

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Last updated 15 Apr 2009, 07:09 CEST. history