Setting up SSL: Ubuntu and Apache 2

If you have a registered DNS name, be sure that you properly set it up. On the Gnome console: System->Administration->Networking:General. Your host/domain name here should match the one you’ll be using in later steps. You can also edit /etc/hosts directly if you’re comfortable with that route.

If you haven’t done so already, use apt-get, Synaptic or some other tool to get and install Apache 2. I prefer apache2-mpm-prefork. You should also have openssl by this point.

This step suggests putting certificate-related files in this location: /etc/apache2/ssl. If the “ssl” directory doesn’t already exist there, go ahead and mkdir it now.

Then copy the server.key and server.crt files into position:

cp server.key /etc/apache2/ssl
cp server.crt /etc/apache2/ssl  

You’ll want to run the /usr/sbin/a2enmod script. If you look at this script, it’s simply a general purpose utility to establish a symlink between a module in /etc/apache2/mods-available to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled (or give a message to the effect that a given module doesn’t exist or that it’s already symlinked for loading).

a2enmod ssl

(4) Create a stub SSL conf. file (if needed) and establish a necessary symlink.
NOTE. Ubuntu 10.04 already ships with a stub SSL conf file (/etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl), so you won’t need to copy the ‘default’ conf as a stub for the ‘default-ssl’ conf — but you will STILL need a symlink between it and the sites-enabled directory.

So if using an Ubuntu prior to ~10.04:

cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl

For all versions of Ubuntu:

Next, establish a symlink from the ‘available’ default-ssl file to the ‘enabled’ file. The symlinking methodology between those two directories is similar in philosophy to mods-available and mods-enabled (previous step). The general idea is that enabled files exist as symlinks created to their available counterparts. Ubuntu prefixes ‘000-‘ in front of the default file, so we may as well keep the same convention with default-ssl:

ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default-ssl

And for apache 2.4 the command is:

ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default-ssl.conf

The default location for HTML pages with an initial install of Ubuntu is /var/www and there exists no separate place for ssl files. I prefer to serve up basic HTML pages in /var/www/html and SSL pages in /var/www-ssl/html. Whatever works for you. But at this point I create the directories.

cd /var/www
mkdir html
cd /var
mkdir www-ssl
cd www-ssl
mkdir html

su to the superuser and make a backup of the original Apache configuration file. Call it whatever you want. My practice is to add “_original” to any default configuration file before I make changes — in case I need to revert. You should not make a backup of the following file in the sites-enabled directory, since both the original and backup will be loaded when you restart Apache. Also note that a symlink exists from /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default to /etc/apache2/sites-available/default. Back it up in the sites-available directory or some other location outside of Apache altogether.

sudo su
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default default_original(Note: If using Ubuntu 10.04+ you may want to backup the original SSL conf also):
cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl default-ssl_original

Now you need to declare the IP of your box (or FQDN/DNS name) and document roots you created in a previous step.

To configure HTTP over port 80 (edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default):

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/

Similar procedure for HTTPS over port 443 (edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl):

NameVirtualHost *:443

<VirtualHost *:443>
ServerName localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www-ssl/html/

Go to this file /etc/apache2/ports.conf and add the following to it:

Listen 443

I noted that starting with Ubuntu 7.10 (or thereabouts), the ports.conf may already have an IfModule clause in it for the SSL portion. If you see this, you can just leave it as-is:

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
    Listen 443
</IfModule>

Make sure the following are in your default-ssl file. The SSLengine should be on, and the cert and key should be properly pathed:

SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/server.key

When starting and stopping Apache there may be a complaint such as “Could not determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName”. You may encounter this if you don’t have a DNS name for your server, and are just using an IP. If this applies to you, go into your /etc/hosts file and make the following changes. Basically, we’ll be adding “localhost.localdomain” to the 127.0.0.1 IP and whatever system name you chose when you installed Ubuntu (assuming you’ve not changed it). The final line below should be there if you have a static IP, and corresponding DNS name registered to it. If this is the case, earlier steps that wanted ServerName should have a value which corresponds to the DNS name also indicated here.

It may be that I first noticed additional behavior with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. If you don’t have a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) for your box, you may need to make an additional tweak. In your /etc/apache2/apache2.conf file, you may want to add the following line at the very end of the file if Apache is still complaining about lacking a fully qualified domain name at startup:

ServerName localhost

Restart Apache.

cd /etc/init.d
./apache2 restart

Done — test it out!