There are many instances when we require pubic certificates for some testing or temporarily purpose. I find sslforfree.com very useful and tried it’s 3 month certificates multiple times for my testing.

Today I will explain, how to get a multi-domain certificate from sslforfree.com and export it in pfx format.

  • Prerequisites
    • Must have access of your domain’s dns to create few TXT dns records.
    • Plan for the FQDNs under ssl certificate.
    • CSR if you want to have your own private key.
  • Login to sslforfree.com and type your domain names in the box separated by space.
    • e.g mail.learn4coming.xyz sso.learn4coming.xyz misc.learn4coming.xyz

firstpage

  • Click on ‘Create Free SSL Certificate’, it will redirect you to a new page for verification and This web page will look like below.1 verification page
  • At this point you must login to your domain’s dns provider becuase once you click on ‘Manual Verification’, It will ask you to create txt record for each of the fqdn.

2. dns entry

  • Login to your dns provider and create txt record as shown (above is just an example, your will get unique value for your fqdns) and put respective values.
    • I have noticed that most of the times, even if you close this webpage and open it again, these values will remain same for some time, hence you can create the records and come back again to this page later.
    • Site URL looks like below, you can create your url based on the mentioned fqdns :- https://www.sslforfree.com/create?domains=mail.learn4coming.xyz+sso.learn4coming.xyz
  • Once you are done creating dns records like below :

3. dns record created.jpg

  • Verify on portals like http://www.mxtoolbox.com to make sure those have been replicated on internet. Perform verification for each dns record.

replicated.jpg

  • Click on ‘Download Now’, this will verify and generate certificate.
  • Once successful, you will get an option to ‘Download All SSL Certificates Files‘, It will contain privatekey, certificate and CA Cert.modify.jpg
  • Downloaded cert files will look like below :

downloaded.jpg

  • Since I want to use this certificate on IIS Server, I had to convert it to pfx format by running below command. you can find openssl on any webpage and run command against it.sssl
  • Now you can use this pfx cert on any windows server and it contains private key as well.

Thank you for reading !