How to use CertifyMe with Nginx and Blazor Server on Windows.

It much easier to setup Nginx to use https and forward http requests to your Blazor server app then to build https in your app.

So first, add the following to your nginx.conf file. Assuming here that nginx is location in C:\Tools

server {
    listen      80;
    server_name blog.yellow-cab.nl;

    root C:/Tools/nginx/html; # Use forward slashes !
    location /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
        #try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

Then

mkdir "C:\tools\nginx\html\.well-known\acme-challenge"

echo "test" > "C:\tools\nginx\html\.well-known\acme-challenge\configcheck"

Now restart nginx, either (re)start the nginx.exe process or run

nginx -s reload

Open CertifyMe and add the certificate you want to create

On the advanced tab, set the root directory of your nginx install and uncheck both boxes under Root Directory.

Now open Deployment and select ‘Certificate story only’

Now request the certificate, open the location machine certificates MMC and export the cert to pfx. Make sure the remember the password.

Since Nginx doesn’t understand PFX, we need to convert this to pfx and key files.

Go to https://slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html and install OpenSSL

Now run these command:

C:\Tools\OpenSSL-Win64\bin\openssl pkcs12 -in C:\Tools\Cert\yc.pfx -nocerts -out C:\Tools\Cert\yc.key -nodes

C:\Tools\OpenSSL-Win64\bin\openssl pkcs12 -in C:\Tools\Cert\yc.pfx -clcerts -nokeys -out C:\Tools\Cert\yc.crt

Now these new files can be used in nginx

server {
    listen       443;
    server_name  www.yellow-cab.nl;

    # SSL configuration
    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate      C:\Tools\Cert\yc.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key  C:\Tools\Cert\yc.key;
    ssl_protocols        TLSv1.2;        # Adjust protocols as needed
    ssl_ciphers          HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5;

In the next post, I’ll show you how to setup Blazor server properly so requests are processed properly.

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