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Certification Authorities

Before version 6.0, IP Fabric used the CA bundle shipped with node.js. This led to confusion as system utilities were not aware of new certificates.

Since version 6.0, we have switched to global cert store trusted by openssl. Internally, this is achieved by passing --use-openssl-ca to node.js.

Adding a custom certificate

You can add a certificate by placing its .crt file in the /usr/local/share/ca-certificates directory and running the following command:

update-ca-certificates

We recommend creating a subdirectory in case you are going to add multiple certificates:

mkdir /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/my_custom_ca

Info

The certificate has to be in PEM format with .crt extension. Files with other extensions are omitted.

After placing the certificate in the directory, you will need to run the update-ca-certificates command to link the certificate to the Trusted Root Certificate Store. Running it should give you an output similar to the following:

Updating certificates in /etc/ssl/certs...
1 added, 0 removed; done.
Running hooks in /etc/ca-certificates/update.d...
done.

Converting to .crt

.crt is nothing more than a PEM certificate with a custom extension. If you need to convert your certificate, you can use the openssl command-line tool to do so:

openssl x509 -in my_custom_ca.der -out /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/my_custom_ca.crt

openssl is typically pretty good at guessing the input format.

Deleting a custom certificate

  1. Remove relevant files/subdirectories from /usr/local/share/ca-certificates.
  2. Run update-ca-certificates.