How To Generate A CSR in Linux Using OpenSSL

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One of the main points of Bauer-Power is that it is my own personal knowledge base. I can't remember everything, so I often times will write up a how-to here on Bauer-Power so I can easily go back later and look it up in one place. That is what this post is about.

I occasionally have to use SSL on Apache web servers in Linux, but I don't do it often enough that I remember all of the OpenSSL commands that I need to get things done. For instance, the command needed to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) that I can use to obtain an SSL certificate from a third party certificate authority (CA).

That command is:

openssl req -nodes -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout SSL.key -out SSL.csr

That will start off some prompts that you can fill out to generate your private key file, as well as the  CSR you will need to get a certificate from your third party SSL provider.

Note, you can change the bits number to 2048 or 1024 if you want, I prefer a stronger RSA key though. You can also change the names of the key and csr file to whatever you want.

Anyway, if you already knew how to do this, awesome! Like I said, this post is mainly for me :-P

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