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I have wildcard cert that I pulled from one of my Windows servers and am attempting to put that cert onto a machine running Apache. I have the pem file that contains the private key as well as 4 chunks labeled as certificates.

From what I have read online I am supposed to separate the key into its own file file.key and then separate the certificate. This is where I get confused: do I need to separate all of these certs into separate files or into just one .crt file?

From there I know I need to make changes in the config file(s) for Apache, however I have a file called httpd.conf (which most of what I read online say to edit) and I have another file called ssl.conf. So which of these should I be putting the edited lines on? With the edited lines being this:

SSLCertificateKeyFile /filepath
SSLCertifaceFile /filepath

2 Answers 2

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As you noted the private key should be in a file of its own used with SSLCertificateKeyFile.

Presumably the multiple certificates are intermediate certificates (maybe also the root cert?) in addition to your own certificate.

SSLCertificateFile requires at least the end entity certificate but you can (and should, when applicable) also provide any intermediate certificates in that same file.

As noted in the documentation, these should be ordered correctly:

The files may also include intermediate CA certificates, sorted from leaf to root.


You will probably want to inspect the certificates to make sure which is which, then concatenate them and provide them to SSLCertificateFile.

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  • And these changes should be made in the ssl.conf file and not the httpd.conf file correct?
    – justin
    Jul 8, 2016 at 17:43
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You should not need to extract the private key from all four, it's likely only one of them has a private key anyway. You only need to break up one of the certs, the actual wildcard certificate itself.

You should also edit the ssl.conf file, as it's the one typically used to manage HTTPS sites.

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