working with someone who has a cpanel server. they want https on it. cpanel doesn't do that by default. google doesn't reveal much in the way of tutorials for this, so here's a note for people to find.
- generate a key pair and certificate using the Generate a SSL Certificate & Signing Request page. Copy the certificate onto your clipboard.
- go to the Install a SSL Certificate and Setup the Domain page. Paste in the certificate. click fetch on the key text field and it should populate that field for you. Set the username to nobody so that all users can use this key pair.
- When you save that page, apache will reload and you'll get https service on port 443, with a self-signed certificate (and so with consequent certificate mismatch error messages). But your existing domains won't work on that server - they'll go to the default cpanel parking page - cpanel only configures its virtual hosts on port 80... grr
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So next I made an apache mod_rewrite rule in the VirtualHost directive for the port 443 virtual server. That causes all the internal sites appear on port 443.
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.+) http://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [P]That's an awkward hack to have to add to cpanel's generated config, but it seems to work (modulo invalid certificate warnings that all users ignore anyway)...
There's also a hole in the way that that rewrite rule is implemented: with a custom http client, you can probably make this server act as an arbitrary proxy for you, depending on mod_proxy configuration.
Thanks for this, you are the only one presenting a solution, will be trying it out.
ReplyDeleteBasically it's stupid. You install your SSL with cPanel, restart Apache.
Then your site with HTTPS:// works great, but HTTP:// stops working, giving you default apache webpage or 404 error stating there is nothing there (PORT 80)