Just found out another reason why I do like Laravel Forge. Installing Self Signed Certificates is even easier than I thought. We normally did it the old  fashioned way. Meaning we did all from the command line. The CSR generation, Certificate inclusion of other base certificates, adding it to the server and reloading it all

Old Setup

We would basically do all this, even on Forge servers where this is not needed:

• generate the CSR with openssl,
• concatenate the generated certificate with root and intermediate certificates,
• add certificate manually to the server,
• edit nginx config to load correct certificate
• and reload the Nginx server.

Forge Way

That is all not needed with Laravel Forge

In Laravel Forge you can generate a Certificate Signing Request. This can be done from the Forge control panel. No need for the command line. This you can then use with your SSL Certificate provider , Xolphin in our case, to generate the certificate itself. With the CSR they generate the SSL Certificate and share the other root and intermediate certificates.

Now here comes the kicker. In the past we messed around combining that private key with the intermediate and root certificates. However that was because we did not do it the Forge way. After Forge generated the CSR and you used it create the private key or SSL key you can click on install. Then you will see a popup where you can add the certificate. And the automatic detection of intermediate certificates is then taken care of. No more combining of certificates. You only need to add the base certificate. How cool is that!