How to Generate a Self-Signed SSL Certificate on Linux

SSL is on a lot of people’s minds today. With free Let’s Encrypt certificates becoming extremely common, there’s no reason for anyone to not use SSL – not to mention the search ranking benefits, and the fact that browsers will trust your site. However, you can also create your own self-signed SSL certificate for private use on your server. One big reason to do this is encryption. While your personal certificate won’t mean anything to browsers, and visitors will still get a warning message if they visit your site directly, you can at least be sure that you’re protected against ???man-in-the-middle??? attacks. A self-signed certificate is a good first step when you’re just testing things out on your server, and perhaps don’t even have a domain name yet.