Self-Signed SSL: NGINX on MAC

Till now, we have installed Nginx and did a simple configuration to host an html file locally.

In this part we will be configuring Nginx with a self-signed certificate. We will be creating a self signed certificate using openssl and make Nginx use it for serving content over https. Let's get our hands dirty. Open our pal, Terminal and lets create a couple of folders to store our key and certificate. Fire the following commands:

mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/ssl/private mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs 

Ideally you can create these folders anywhere but it's a good practice to have them at the above given path. We will now create key and certificate by running the below command:

sudo openssl req \ -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 \ -keyout /usr/local/etc/ssl/private/self-signed.key \ -out /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/self-signed.crt 

Let's alter our server context from previous tutorial. The updated file is as below.

events { } http { server { # Listen on port 80 which is the default http port listen 80; # Set a permanent redirection from http to https return 301 https://localhost:443; } } 

Add another server context inside http context with configuration and locations relating to SSL

 server { listen 443 ssl; # location of ssl certificate ssl_certificate /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/self-signed.crt; # location of ssl key ssl_certificate_key /usr/local/etc/ssl/private/self-signed.key; } 

Add location context inside the ssl server context

location / { root /Users/arjav/Desktop/www; index index.html index.htm; } 

This is the whole configuration file:

events { } http { # HTTP server server { listen 80; return 301 https://localhost:443; } # HTTPS server server { listen 443 ssl; ssl_certificate /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/self-signed.crt; ssl_certificate_key /usr/local/etc/ssl/private/self-signed.key; location / { root /Users/arjav/Desktop/www; index index.html index.htm; } } } 

As a last step we will need to add the self-signed certificate to the system keychain. Run the below command in your terminal.

sudo security add-trusted-cert \ -d -r trustRoot \ -k /Library/Keychains/System.keychain /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/self-signed.crt 

Voila! That's it. In your terminal verify your configuration file by running

nginx -t

and if everything looks okay reload your Nginx server by running

nginx -s reload

Visit https://127.0.0.1. You will still see a red flag or "Not secure" sign in your browser saying that your certificate is invalid, but that it's because not signed by a third-part authority. Rest assured the content is served over secure channels.

In the next chapter we will look at some advanced ssl configuration options for better security, caching and optimisation.