Creating a New Private Key and Certificate Signing Request (CSR)

I do this rarely enough that I always have to look it up and be very careful that I’m doing exactly what I want to do.

Update for modern day, we want the signing request and the certificate to be signed with SHA-2 (SHA256).

Check Prerequisites

Check if and what version of openssl is installed:

openssl version to get basic versioning and a date.

rpm -qa | grep -i openssl to get more detailed version info.

Generate Private Key and CSR

openssl req -new -sha256 -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout example.com.key -out example.com.csr

Also interesting, apparently you can include the CSR details on the command line. e.g.

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -out www.example.com.csr -keyout www.example.com.key -subj "/C=US/ST=SC/L=Magic Hills/O=Dinglepie Berry Farms/CN=www.example.com"

Check the CSR

openssl req -in www.example.com.csr -noout -text