awinabi

Setting up a SSL Cert from Comodo

I use Namecheap.com as a registrar, and they resale SSL Certs from a number of other companies, including Comodo.

These are the steps I went through to set up an SSL cert.

Purchase the cert

awinabi

# 1) Create your private key (any password will do, we remove it below)
$ cd ~/.ssh
$ openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.orig.key 2048

# 2) Remove the password
$ openssl rsa -in server.orig.key -out server.key


# 3) Generate the csr (Certificate signing request) (Details are important!)

awinabi

Rails 3.1 introduced force_ssl. You can add config.force_ssl = true in application.rb.

• Rails guide

By enabling force_ssl, Rails send a HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) header which will expired in a year.

• Related discussion in Rails repository
• Rack SSL source code

So if you enabled force_ssl once, even you change the config value to false later, the browser you used to open you app before will still remember this website (using domain to identify) require to use HTTPS, and redirect you to HTTPS connection automatically. You may use chrome://net-internals/#hsts to check the domain list in Google Chrome.

awinabi

Capybara Actions

# Anchor
click_link 'Save'

# Button
click_button 'awesome'

# Both above