We can create a self-signed key and certificate pair with OpenSSL in a single command :

sudo openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout  /etc/ssl/private/apache-selfsigned.key -out /etc/ssl/certs/apache-selfsigned.crt

You will be asked a series of questions. Before we go over that, let’s take a look at what is happening in the command we are issuing:

Output
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:US
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:New York
Locality Name (eg, city) []:New York City
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:Bouncy Castles, Inc.
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Ministry of Water Slides
Common Name (e.g. server FQDN or YOUR name) []:server_IP_address
Email Address []:admin@your_domain.com

Both of the files you created will be placed in the appropriate subdirectories under /etc/ssl.

We have created our key and certificate files under the /etc/ssl directory. Now we just need to modify our Apache configuration to take advantage of these.

We will make a few adjustments to our configuration :

1. We will create a configuration snippet to specify strong default SSL settings.
2. We will modify the included SSL Apache Virtual Host file to point to our generated SSL certificates.(Recommended)
3. We will modify the unencrypted Virtual Host file to automatically redirect requests to the encrypted Virtual Host.

When we are finished, we should have a secure SSL configuration.

First, we will create an Apache configuration snippet to define some SSL settings. This will set Apache up with a strong SSL cipher suite and enable some advanced features that will help keep our server secure. The parameters we will set can be used by any Virtual Hosts enabling SSL.

Create a new snippet in the /etc/apache2/conf-available directory. We will name the file ssl-params.conf to make its purpose clear:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/conf-available/ssl-params.conf