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Generating a Self-Signed SSL Certificate

I recently switched some web services to use SSL, and I was surprised that I couldn't find a good non-interactive script to generate the files needed for Jetty and other Java containers. After working my way through writing the script, I have decided to share my approach. This script generates a SSL subdirectory of whatever folder it lives in, and to that directory it adds a password file, certificate and a Java-friendly PKCS12 version of the certificate.

And then I have my Maven build process copy the generated files into the base of my classes directory. The embedded Jetty instance needed an input stream of the PKCS12 file and the contents of the password file to create a SSL connector. Reading from the classpath can be a bit tricky - I should post about that later. From past experience, I think Nginx also requires the certificate file when configuring SSL.

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