Tracer Round

How to install a SSL Certificate in WHM/cPanel

This tutorial is for installing your own SSL certificate if purchased outside of Surpass Hosting (if purchased through Surpass, they will set it up for you ). Please be kind and let me know of any mistakes I may have made in the process.

NOTE: This is for your own SSL cert for a person who has access to WHM (Resellers and Dedicated Servers with WHM installed). If you are a shared hosting customer, you will need to contact support to find out the process.

First of all, for any SSL certificate that isn't a shared one, you must have a Dedicated IP address for the domain. Dedicated means "one", so you cannot have any other accounts on this IP address.

After deciding on the company you want to buy the SSL certificate with, log into WHM. Go to Generate an SSL Certificate and Signing Request under the SSL/TLS category. You should now see a form for creating your CSR. Below will describe what should go in each text box.

Email Address the Cert will be sent to. - Your email address
Host to make cert for - If you want the secure page to be https://www.yourdomain.com then you will put www.yourdomain.com in this box.
City - Your city (or the companies city the SSL Cert is for)
State - Your state (or the companies state the SSL Cert is for)
Country (2 letter Abbreviation) - Country (examples: US for United States or CA for Canada)
Company Name - The company name the cert is for. If there is no company, just put the Host name.
Company Division - Put the company division (examples: Marketing, Retail, Hosting)
Email - Email of the person who the SSL Cert belongs to. (Can be the same as the Email Address the cert will be sent to)
Password- Password or challenge password. Make it hard, like every password should be and store it in a safe place and do not forget/lose it. If you do, you will have to purchase another certificate.

After you have put all of the information in, click create. You will now receive your CSR and your Private Key. Just like the challenge password, store your Private Key in a safe place because if you lose it, you will have to purchase another certificate.

This is where your chosen SSL certificate company comes in. Go through their process of purchasing and creating your SSL certificate. Every company's process is different but in general they will ask you for some personal information such as Name, Email Address, and Telephone number. They ask this information to verify that you are who you say you are and you are ordering a certificate for a domain that you own, not someone else’s. They will ask for your CSR and your private key that you gotten from WHM. After you are fully authenticated (could take a few replies to emails and maybe even a phone call from the company to you) they will send you the certificate in an email.

When you receive your SSL certificate from the company, load up WHM again. Go to Install an SSL Certificate and Setup the Domain under SSL/TLS again. This time you will see three large and three small textboxes. Scroll to the three smaller textboxes. There should be Domain, User, and IP Address textboxes. For domain name, enter the domain name (example: www.yourdomain.com). For User, enter that domains cPanel username. The IP address should have been automatically entered when you entered the User, but if it didn't then enter the domain's Dedicated IP address.

After filling in that information, the CSR that you created for this domain should have automatically loaded the CSR and private key. If it didn't, you can either paste your saved copy of your private key into the key textbox or click on Fetch and it should automatically be filled in. The private key should be in the following format:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
YOUR KEY
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

Delete what is in the top textbox (this was your CSR) and paste in your certificate that the SSL cert company gave you. The Certificate should be in the following format:

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
YOUR CERTIFICATE
-----END CERTIFICATE-----

Verify everything is correct and click Do it. It will install the certificate for you and then restart the Apache (http) server for you.

You should now be able to go to https://www.yourdomain.com without any problems. You should see the locked icon in the taskbar (and/or address bar) and when you view the information for the Certificate, it should be for your domain.

This tutorial was written by Tracer Round with a special thanks to Ehaanaes for helping me though my first SSL certificate setup. Without him, I would still be trying to figure out how to log into SSH.

__________________
2005 Surpassies: Winner of Most Skilled Wordsmith

SH129 - Power
SH81 - OC5

Ehaanaes

Stickified, after last days SSL-threads i felt we needed this one somewhere.

__________________
Owner of Minerva and Server :: Beatiful P4's Surpass
http://www.case-spider.com
Winner of the Surpassies 2004 - Most Spirit. :bravo:
Google = Friend!

bromar

Great instructions!
Please, let me know if these are the same for secure email certs? Should I create a mail.domain.tld subdomain for that part?
Thanks.
MB