Starting Apache with SSL Support

Once mod_ssl has been installed and configured, you can start Apache with

apachectl start

If you are using the default SSL configuration files, or the ones supplied by your vendor, the SSL directives will likely be surrounded by an <IfDefine SSL> block.

You can either remove those blocks or start Apache with

apachectl startssl

which will pass the -DSSL flag to the server binary and enable the SSL configuration. This only needs to be done in Apache 1.3 and 2.0, as Apache 2.2 no longer includes a startssl option, and SSL directives are not treated any differently than other directives.

If you protected your private key with a pass phrase, you will need to enter it now. If you installed Apache as a regular user, it may have been configured to listen by default at port 8443. As explained in Chapter 2, port 443 is a privileged port and is only accessible by the superuser.

You can test the installation by accessing your server as https://www.example.com (or https://www.example.com:8443 as just explained).