How to install mod_ssl for Apache httpd?

Question

Ok

So I installed Apache httpd a while ago and have recently come back to it to try setup SSL and get it serving several different tomcat servers.

At the moment I have two completely separate Tomcat instances serving up to slightly different versions (one for dev and one for demo say) my web app to two different ports:

• example.com:8081
• example.com:8082

I've successfully (back in Jan) used mod_jk to get httpd to serve those same Tomcat instances to http://www.example.com:8090/dev and http://www.example.com:8090/demo (8090 cos I've got another app running on 8080 via Jetty at this stage) using the following code in httpd.conf:

LoadModule jk_module modules/mod_jk.so
JkWorkersFile conf/workers.properties
JkLogFile logs/mod_jk.log
JkLogLevel debug

<VirtualHost *:8090>
    JkMount /devd* tomcatDev
    JkMount /demo* tomcatDemo
</VirtualHost>

What I'm not trying to do is enable SSL.

I've added the following to httpd.conf:

Listen 443
<VirtualHost _default_:443>
    JkMount /dev* tomcatDev
    JkMount /demo* tomcatDemo
    SSLEngine on
    SSLCertificateFile "/opt/httpd/conf/localhost.crt"
    SSLCertificateKeyFile "/opt/httpd/conf/keystore.key"
</VirtualHost>

But when I try to restart Apache with apachectl restart (yes after shutting down that other app I mentioned so it doesn't toy with https connections) I continuously get the error:

Invalid command 'SSLEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration. httpd not running, trying to start

I've looked in the httpd/modules dir and indeed there is no mod_ssl, only mod_jk.so and httpd.exp.

I've tried using yum to install mod_ssl, it says its already installed. Indeed I can locate mod_ssl.so in /usr/lib/httpd/modules but this is NOT the path to where I've installed httpd which is /opt/httpd and in fact /usr/lib/httpd contains nothing but the modules dir.

Can anyone tell me how to install mod_ssl properly for my installed location of httpd so I can get past this error?

Carangid

Answer 1

Are any other LoadModule commands referencing modules in the /usr/lib/httpd/modules folder? If so, you should be fine just adding LoadModule ssl_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_ssl.so to your conf file.

Otherwise, you'll want to copy the mod_ssl.so file to whatever directory the other modules are being loaded from and reference it there.

Galactic

In my Apache installation mod_ssl.so was outright missing. Turns out its separate from the base installation and was under the package mod_ssl in the yum package manger. Downloaded using yum install mod_ssl then it appeared in the modules folder. – Quenna

I found, after compiling my own apache 2 that mod_ssl.so was missing. need to compile it again, from scratch. – Launcher

@Quenna thanks, I confirm that after installing the module it included the module and also added a ssl.conf file that has the needed configurations. – Nestle

Answer 2

I found I needed to enable the SSL module in Apache (obviously prefix commands with sudo if you are not running as root):

a2enmod ssl

then restart Apache:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

More details of SSL in Apache for Ubuntu / Debian here.

Tiossem

Which distribution OS are u using? – Hoopoe

@Hoopoe a2enmod is from the Debian world. – Psychro

Answer 3

Try installing mod_ssl using following command:

yum install mod_ssl

and then reload and restart your Apache server using following commands:

systemctl reload httpd.service
systemctl restart httpd.service

This should work for most of the cases.

Parous

If you install Apache from source, then yum will not be able to detect it. Instead it will install a duplicate (outdated) version of Apache, and put mod_ssl.so in that Apache's module files. – Numinous

Answer 4

I used:

sudo yum install mod24_ssl

and it worked in my Amazon Linux AMI.

Yulan

Answer 5

I don't know if it is still of interest and if things have changed ever since the thread has been posted, but the /etc/apache2/apache2.conf on my system says:

Configuration files in the mods-enabled/, conf-enabled/ and sites-enabled/ directories contain particular configuration snippets which manage modules, global configuration fragments, or virtual host configurations, respectively.

They are activated by symlinking available configuration files from their respective *-available/ counterparts. These should be managed by using our helpers a2enmod/a2dismod, a2ensite/a2dissite and a2enconf/a2disconf. See their respective man pages for detailed information.

And on my system the modules are installed in /usr/lib/apache2/modules. I am running Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS.

Infamous