Ssl – Generate SSL certificate using Keytool

You can't use a keystore with just about anything not written in Java, as far as I know. It's also not possible to extract the key with keytool.

I'd recommend using something like http://www.openssl.org/docs/HOWTO/keys.txt or the easy-rsa-tools included with OpenVPN to generate a new key/certificate-combo, which will by default be generated in a format readable by nginx.

If it is important to extract the key from the keystore, there's a guide at http://conshell.net/wiki/index.php/Keytool_to_OpenSSL_Conversion_tips on how to extract it.

Is it possible that the lines are ^M-terminated? This is a potential issue when moving files from Windows to UNIX systems. One easy way to check is to use vi in "show me the binary" mode, with vi -b /etc/apache2/domain.ssl/domain.ssl.crt/domain.com.crt.

If each line ends with a control-M, like this

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----^M
MIIDITCCAoqgAwIBAgIQL9+89q6RUm0PmqPfQDQ+mjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQUFADBM^M
MQswCQYDVQQGEwJaQTElMCMGA1UEChMcVGhhd3RlIENvbnN1bHRpbmcgKFB0eSkg^M
THRkLjEWMBQGA1UEAxMNVGhhd3RlIFNHQyBDQTAeFw0wOTEyMTgwMDAwMDBaFw0x^M

you've got a file in Windows line-terminated format, and apache doesn't love those.

Your options include moving the file over again, taking more care; or using the dos2unix command to strip those out; you can also remove them inside vi, if you're careful.

Edit: thanks to @dave_thompson_085, who points out that this answer no longer applies in 2019. That is, Apache/OpenSSL are now tolerant of ^M-terminated lines, so they don't cause problems. That said, other formatting errors, several different examples of which appear in the comments, can still cause problems; check carefully for these if the certificate has been moved across systems.