Before you can teach your server to speak TLS, you will need a certificate issued by a trusted certificate authority (CA). If your organization already runs its own CA and you have a private key and certificate for your Nginx server, along with your CA's root certificate, you can skip to the next step.
To request a certificate from your CA using the step
CLI, bootstrap your CA with step ca bootstrap
and run the following command (sub the server name for the actual name / DNS name of your Nginx server).
$ step ca certificate "myserver.internal.net" server.crt server.key
Your certificate and private key will be saved in server.crt
and server.key
respectively.
Request a copy of your CA root certificate, which will be used to make sure each application can trust certificates presented by other applications.
$ step ca root ca.crt
Your certificate will be saved in ca.crt
.
We now want to instruct our Nginx server to identify itself using the certificate issued in the last step and to force clients to connect over TLS.
In your Nginx configuration's server block, enable ssl
for the listening socket and specify the locations of the server's certificate and private key. We'll also tell Nginx to use TLS protocols and our preferred ciphers:
server {
listen 443 ssl;
server_name myserver.internal.net;
ssl_certificate server.crt;
ssl_certificate_key server.key;
ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
ssl_ciphers HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5;
# ...
}
To tell Nginx to use mutual TLS and not just one-way TLS, we must instruct it to require client authentication to ensure clients present a certificate from our CA when they connect.
In your server's configuration block, specify the location of your CA root certificate to use for authenticating client certificates. You may choose to make client verification optional so your application can return a 403 message:
server {
listen 443 ssl;
server_name myserver.internal.net;
# ...
ssl_client_certificate /etc/nginx/client_certs/ca.crt;
ssl_verify_client optional;
# ...
location / {
if ($ssl_client_verify != SUCCESS) {
return 403;
}
# ...
}
That's it! Nginx should now be able to receive TLS connections from clients who authenticate themselves using a certificate issued by your trusted CA.
Request a new certificate from your CA to represent your Axios (JS) client.
$ step ca certificate "myuser" client.crt client.key
Your certificate and private key will be saved in client.crt
and client.key
respectively.
Now, we need only to configure our Axios (JS) client to make authenticated requests using our certificate and private key. The CA root certificate will be used to verify that the client can trust the certificate presented by the server.
Create a custom https
agent configured with your certificate, private key, and root CA certificate. Pass this agent to axios when you call axios.get()
(or its respective request method) to authenticate your request over TLS.
const fs = require('fs');
const https = require('https');
const axios = require('axios');
// ...
const httpsAgent = new https.Agent({
cert: fs.readFileSync('client.crt'),
key: fs.readFileSync('client.key'),
ca: fs.readFileSync('ca.crt'),
});
const result = await axios.get('https://myserver.internal.net:443', { httpsAgent });
// do something with the result
// ...
By default, step-ca
issues certificates with a 24 hour expiration. Short-lived certificates have many benefits but also require that you renew your certificates each day before they expire. How you renew certificates is often dependent on how you deploy your application. See the step-ca
certificate lifecycle management docs for more information.
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