Howto generate SSL certificates for apache

If we haven't got the SSL certificates for apache, we have to generate this. In order to do it, we are going to change to the apache source tree directory:

cd ../apache_1.3.27/
make certificate TYPE=custom
cp -a conf/ssl* /usr/local/apache/conf/
chown -R www:www /usr/local/apache/conf/ssl  (where www:www are the UID and GID of the 
                                              user who will run the apache server process)

This will answer us some cuestions. When this process finishes, if we have said to encrypt the private key with a pass phrase, for security reasons, we will have to write this phrase every time we start apache server. If we don't want this, because we are going to put a script at boot time to automaticallly start apache when the computer turn on, we have to decrypt this key. To do so we have to do the next action:

cd /usr/local/apache/conf/ssl.key/
mv server.key server.key.secure
/usr/local/ssl/bin/openssl rsa -in server.key.secure -out server.key

This will decrypt the key, so the apache server will start without answer us for a password.