Certs for Homelab

I recently had the opportunity to add an ssl certificate in my homelab environment. It was really easy and only took one command in Linux. Once I created my ssl certificate all I had to do was upload it to NGINX Proxy Manager and have it serve it to my proxied sites.

You can use any other proxy manager such as Caddy but I had NGINX Proxy Manager in my homelab environment. Be sure to upload both the .crt and .key files.

Let’s examine what the following commands does.

openssl req -newkey rsa:4096 -x509 -sha256 365 -nodes -out homessl.crt -keyout homessl.key

First openssl req -newkey rsa:4096 -x509 -sha256 365 stating that we want openssl to create a new certificate using rsa 4096 with type of x509 a hash of sha 256 for 365 days.

Then -nodes -out homessl.crt -keyout homessl.key is telling openssl that we want the cert file and a key file.

Once you run this command you should have 2 files on your system. In this example they would be homessl.crt and homessl.key. Those 2 files you simply upload to your proxy manager or cert authority of choice and you will have valid self-signed openssl certificates. If you are curious to learn more about OpenSSL you can always check out the manpages online at https://www.openssl.org/docs/man3.0/man7/crypto.html.

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