Generating a Certificate Signing Request

To purchase an SSL certificate from a CA, you need first to generate what is called a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). This is submitted to the CA of your choice, and is used to create the official and singed SSL certificate that will be returned to you, and with which you may secure your Web server.

# cd /etc/ssl/apache/
# openssl req -new -key domainname.com.key -out domainname.com.csr
        
        

This command creates the .csr file that is sent or uploaded to a CA during the process of ordering an SSL certificate.