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Every time I have to install a GlobalSign SSL Certificate, I always find myself referring to notes that I wrote when I first had to install one. I thought that it may be a good idea to post the process here for mine and anyone else’s reference.

The aim of this post is to guide you from getting from your p12 file to an installed certificate. This guide assumes that you have OpenSSL installed on your PC / Server.

1. Get your GlobalSign PKCS12 certificate (probably globalsigncert.p12)
2. Navigate to the directory where the p12 file is on your PC/Server
3. Run the command “openssl pkcs12 -nocerts -in globalsigncert.p12 -out ssl.key”
4. You will be prompted for the password that you set when you ordered the certificate. (Remember that GlobalSign append some extra characters to the password).
5. You will be prompted to enter a PEM pass phrase. I usually just enter the same password as the p12 file.
6. You will now have a file named ssl.key
7. Run the command “openssl rsa -in ssl.key -out ssl.key”
8. You will be prompted for the pass phrase for ssl.key. Enter the password you used when you were asked for a password in step 5
9. The file named ssl.key will now be decoded so that it can be installed on a cPanel server
10. Run the command “openssl pkcs12 -clcerts -nokeys -in globalsigncert.p12 -out ssl.crt”
11. You will now need to enter the password to your p12 file again
12. You now have all of the files that you need to install the certificate on a cPanel server (ssl.key & ssl.crt).

At this point, we can either install the certificate via WHM, or in cPanel. I will outline both methods below.

WHM SSL Install Instructions

1. Login to WHM
2. Go to “Install a SSL Certificate and Setup the Domain” on the left hand side
3. Copy the contents of ssl.crt into the top box (The three boxes Domain, User and IP should be auto filled by cPanel)
4. Copy the contents of ssl.key into the middle box
5. Navigate to http://www.globalsign.com/support/intermediate-root-install.html
6. Click on the appropriate link for the type of SSL certificate that you have
7. Copy the Intermediate certificate into the third (bottom) box in WHM
8. Finally click Submit at the top
9. Hopefully, it should have installed properly and cPanel will give a message indicating this

cPanel SSL Install Instructions

1. Login to cPanel on the account that you would like to install the SSL certificate on
2. Go to the “SSL/TLS Manager” option
3. Click “Activate SSL on Your Web Site (HTTPS)”
4. Select the domain you would like to install the SSL certificate on at the top
5. Copy the contents of ssl.crt into the top box
6. Copy the contents of ssl.key into the second box
7. Navigate to http://www.globalsign.com/support/intermediate-root-install.html
8. Click on the appropriate link for the type of SSL certificate that you have
9. Copy the Intermediate certificate into the third (bottom) box
10. Click Install Certificate at the bottom
11. Hopefully, you should then see a success message

Just for informational purposes: I extracted my key/crt files on a CentOS 5 machine running OpenSSL version 0.9.8e-fips-rhel5. I have completed the same process before on a Windows machine before, and the process is almost identical.

I hope you have found this article useful. If you have any questions, queries or comments; Please leave a comment below 🙂