Generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) for GOV.UK
A certificate signing request is required when buying or renewing a TLS certificate for a GOV.UK domain.
Buying a new certificate
Execute the following on a POSIX-compliant machine, for example your Mac:
DOMAIN_NAME=example.service.gov.uk sh -c 'openssl req -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout ${DOMAIN_NAME//[^a-zA-Z0-9]/_}.key -out ${DOMAIN_NAME//[^a-zA-Z0-9]/_}.csr -subj "/C=GB/ST=England/L=London/O=UK government/OU=Government Digital Service/CN=${DOMAIN_NAME}/"'
Be sure to replace the value ‘example.service.gov.uk’ set in the
DOMAIN_NAME environment variable to the domain name the TLS
certificate is intended for.
The contents of the .key file must be kept secret. It should be stored encrypted in the govuk-secrets repository.
The contents of the CSR should be shared with the TLS certificate provider. This allows them to generate the TLS certificate.
Renewing a certificate
This is different from generating a new certificate in that we don’t want to have a whole new key, we want to generate a CSR against an existing key.
To find the existing key, decrypt Puppet hiera data for the required environment
and find the wildcard_publishing key. Save this to a file, for the next step.
Execute the following on a POSIX-compliant machine, for example your Mac:
DOMAIN_NAME=*.publishing.service.gov.uk sh -c 'openssl req -nodes -new -key /path/to/wildcard_publishing.key -out ${DOMAIN_NAME//[^a-zA-Z0-9]/_}.csr -subj "/C=GB/ST=England/L=London/O=UK government/OU=Government Digital Service/CN=${DOMAIN_NAME}/"'
Be sure to replace the value ‘example.service.gov.uk’ set in the
DOMAIN_NAME environment variable to the domain name the TLS
certificate is intended for.
The contents of the CSR should be shared with the TLS certificate provider. This allows them to generate the TLS certificate.
Now delete the key file you saved.