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.