How to renew the ISPConfig 3 SSL Certificate

This tutorial describes the steps to renew the SSL Certificate of the ISPConfig 3 control panel. There are two alternative ways to achieve that:

1. Create a new OpenSSL Certificate and CSR on the command line with OpenSSL.
2. Renew the SSL Certificate with the ISPConfig updater

I'll start with the manual way to renew the ssl cert.

1) Create a new ISPConfig 3 SSL Certificate with OpenSSL

Login to your server on the shell as root user. Before we create a new SSL Cert, backup the current ones. SSL Certs are security sensitive so I'll store the backup in the /root/ folder.

tar pcfz /root/ispconfig_ssl_backup.tar.gz /usr/local/ispconfig/interface/ssl
chmod 600 /root/ispconfig_ssl_backup.tar.gz

Now create a new SSL Certificate key, Certificate Request (csr) and a self signed Certificate.

cd /usr/local/ispconfig/interface/ssl
openssl genrsa -des3 -out ispserver.key 4096
openssl req -new -key ispserver.key -out ispserver.csr
openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in ispserver.csr \
-signkey ispserver.key -out ispserver.crt
openssl rsa -in ispserver.key -out ispserver.key.insecure
mv ispserver.key ispserver.key.secure
mv ispserver.key.insecure ispserver.key

Restart Apache to load the new SSL Certificate.

service apache2 restart

2) Renew the SSL Certificate with the ISPConfig installer

The alternative way to get a new SSL Certificate is to use the ISPConfig update script.
Download ISPConfig to the /tmp folder, unpack the archive and start the update script.

cd /tmp
wget http://www.ispconfig.org/downloads/ISPConfig-3-stable.tar.gz
tar xvfz ISPConfig-3-stable.tar.gz
cd ispconfig3_install/install
php -q update.php

The update script will ask the following question during update:

Create new ISPConfig SSL certificate (yes,no) [no]:

Answer "yes" here and the SSL Certificate creation dialog will start.