Setting up Apache with SSL

It took more than I expected to set up Apache SSL on my development system so let’s recap the steps.

Preconditions: openssl and apache2, get sign.sh from here.
1) Setting up a certification authority to self sign the server certificate.

$ mkdir ~/ssl; cd ~/ssl
$ openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 1024
You’ll have to chose a passphrase, store it because you’ll need it every time you’ll sign a certificate.

$ openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -key ca.key -out ca.crt
$ sudo cp ca.crt /etc/ssl/certs/ca.crt
$ sudo cp ca.key /etc/ssl/certs/ca.key

2) Generating the server certificate.

$ openssl genrsa -out domain.com.key 1024
Do not use a passphrase unless you want to enter it each time you’ll restart Apache.

$ openssl req -new -key http://www.domain.com.key -out http://www.domain.com.csr
Remember that the Common Name (CN) is the name of your server.

$ cd /etc/ssl
$ sudo ~/ssl/sign.sh ~/ssl/www.domain.com.csr
You need the CA passphrase here (from step 1). The certificate is created in ~/ssl/www.domain.com.crt

3) Installing the certificates in Apache

$ cd /etc/apache2/ssl
$ sudo cp ~/ssl/www.domain.com.crt .
$ sudo cp ~/ssl/www.domain.com.key .
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

4) Configuring Apache

Add the following lines to your Apache configuration file

NameVirtualHost a.b.c.d
# Explicitly listen on port 443 for SSL to work
# This really surprised me, shouldn’t Apache do it automatically
# after seeing the VirtualHost 192.168.0.40:443 directive?)
Listen 443

<VirtualHost a.b.c.d:80>
ServerAdmin you@domain.com
DocumentRoot /some/where
ServerName http://www.domain.com
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 192.168.0.40:443>
ServerAdmin you@domain.com
DocumentRoot /some/where
ServerName http://www.domain.com
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/domain.com.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/domain.com.key
</VirtualHost>

Restart apache

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

That’s it!

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Stored procedures on Rails

Time ago I learnt how to use stored procedures in Ruby on Rails, but I couldn’t understand how to use them in test. rake test consistently failed to copy my stored procedures from the development to the test database so there was little left to test there.

After upgrading to Rails 1.1.6 I started a new project and this time I made it.

The winning move was uncommenting this line in environment.rb

config.active_record.schema_format = :sql

Rails creates the db/development_structure.sql file now which contains my development database structure, stored procedures included. When I run rake test it uses this file to create the test database and the test code has all it needs to run.