import_ssl_cert.adoc

Importing System-wide and Personal SSL Certificates

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Importing Personal SSL Certificates
• Site-Wide SSL Import
• Using OCC to Import and Manage SSL Certificates

Introduction

Modern Web browsers try to keep us safe, and so they blast us with scary warnings when sites have the smallest errors in their SSL certificates, or when they use self-signed SSL certificates. ownCloud admins encounter this when creating Federation shares, or setting up external storage mounts. There is no reason against using self-signed certificates on your own networks; they’re fast, free, and easy.

Importing Personal SSL Certificates

ownCloud has several methods for importing self-signed certificates so that you don’t have to hassle with Web browser warnings. When you allow your users to create their own external storage mounts or Federation shares, they can import SSL certificates for those shares on their Personal pages.

Click the Import root certificate button to open a file picker. You can distribute copies of your SSL certificates to your users (via an ownCloud share!), or users can download them from their Web browsers. Click on the little padlock icon and click through until you see a btn:[View Certificate] button, then keep going until you can download it. In Firefox and Chromium there is an btn:[Export] button for downloading your own copy of a site’s SSL certificate.

Site-Wide SSL Import

The personal imports only work for individual users. You can enable site-wide SSL certificates for all of your users on your ownCloud admin page. To enable this, you must add this environment variable:

OWNCLOUD_ENABLE_CERTIFICATE_MANAGEMENT=true

Then you’ll have an btn:[Import root certificate] button on your admin page, just like the one on your personal page. Navigate to it by clicking menu:Settings[General > SSL Root Certificates] which is located almost at the bottom.

Using OCC to Import and Manage SSL Certificates

The occ command has options for listing and managing your SSL certificates:

security:certificates         list trusted certificates
security:certificates:import  import trusted certificate
security:certificates:remove  remove trusted certificate

Note	When importing using occ, you must provide a path that is resolvable by the container. A path from the host that is not resolvable by the container will not work. Imported certificates will be located at <mount-point>/files/files_external/uploads/

See Using the occ Command to learn about how to use occ.