This was a micro site I created over a weekend. I was researching how to lock down and encrypt traffic for ElasticSearch when I found that all the tutorials for creating your own self-signed SSL certificate didn’t explain the meaning behind each step they were having you perform. Some tutorials had you create a root certificate and some did not. Trying to figure out why all the tutorials were different, I set out to teach myself all about the SSL generation process.
You know a person understands a concept well when they can explain it to others, but they also know a concept well when they can make a helper program that does the work for others.
The tricky part about this project was NOT using a database to store any data. Trying to communicate with the openssl program binaries exclusively through pipes was quite a head-spinner.