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I'm in the process of migrating from IIS on Windows 2012 to nginx on Ubuntu 16.04. I'm familiar with nginx but not IIS.

On nginx, to have HTTPS working you need both the certificate and the private key. These correspond to the nginx config fields ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key. I have access to the certificates on IIS and have downloaded them.

But I have no idea where to find the private key though and no one in the organisation does either. I have access to the IIS server, where would I find the private key file for the certificate? Failing that, is my only option to get a new certificate?

CadentOrange
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1 Answers1

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Open certificate manager on the Windows server. One way to access this is to run mmc, then add the Certificates add-in, choosing "Local Computer" when asked.

From here you should be able to export the certificate to a backup (pfx) file. Unfortunately you may not get the option to include the private key if the key was not marked as exportable when it was created/imported. In this case you might be out of luck. (There may be ways of accessing the private key, likely involving accessing protected system files, but this obviously isn't a supported method)

If you can export the certificate and key, it's just a case of looking up the right openssl command to extract the cert/key as text for nginx.

USD Matt
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