: Configuring SSL on tomcat 7 and the files and format required There exists lot of information on the web and on stackoverflow regarding configuring SSL on Tomcat but it's still confusing and

@Heady270

First see the Wikipedia article about certificate filename extensions. Your .crt files are likely already in pem format. You should be able to tell because the contents should be like:

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIIDXTCCAkWgAwIBAgIJAJC1HiIAZAiIMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAMEUxCzAJBgNV
* lots of base64 encoded data *
B7xxt8BVc69rLeHV15A0qyx77CLSj3tCx2IUXVqRs5mlSbq094NBxsauYcm0A6Jq
vA==
-----END CERTIFICATE-----


Sometimes your private key comes contained in your certificate file. You can edit the file and see if it contains a -----BEGIN ENCRYPTED PRIVATE KEY----- section. If so, you can copy it out into its own file. From the tomcat documentation, it also looks like you could leave them in the same file and omit the SSLCertificateKeyFile configuration.

You do not put the actual contents of the pem encoded files into the tomcat configuration. Instead you put the file name where you store them on your system. Here is an example tomcat configuration with values filled in for SSL. It ends up looking like this:

SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/my-certificate.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/my-certificate.key
SSLCACertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/root.crt
SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/apache2/ssl/type-2.crt

Vote Up Vote Down