Installing a root/CA Certificate in Ubuntu

08 Sep 2020

SSL certificates work on a structure regarded as the “chain of trust.” It’s a chain of certificates starting from the certificate authority (CA).

Given a CA certificate file foo.crt, follow these steps to install it on Ubuntu:

  1. Create a directory for extra CA certificates in /usr/share/ca-certificates:

    sudo mkdir /usr/share/ca-certificates/extra

  2. Copy the CA .crt file to this directory:

    sudo cp foo.crt /usr/share/ca-certificates/extra/foo.crt

  3. Let Ubuntu add the .crt file’s path relative to /usr/share/ca-certificates to /etc/ca-certificates.conf:

    sudo dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates

    To do this non-interactively, run:

    sudo update-ca-certificates

In case of a .pem file on Ubuntu, it must first be converted to a .crt file:

openssl x509 -in foo.pem -inform PEM -out foo.crt
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