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Retrieve a demo certificate

To be able to send traffic through the NLX network, you'll need a certificate and private key. The certificate and key are used to encrypt traffic between you and other nodes.

In this part we will generate & install all required certificates. Before you continue, make sure you have set up your environment.

Generate internal & organization certificates​

Generate the required internal and organization certificates by running the following command in the nlx-try-me directory.

docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/workdir -w /workdir --entrypoint /bin/bash cfssl/cfssl:v1.6.4 ./scripts/init-certs.sh

See OpenSSL questions to know what to fill in the OpenSSL questions asked by the script.

OpenSSL questions​

Answer the questions accordingly:

  • Country Name, enter any value
  • State, enter any value
  • Locality Name, enter any value
  • Organization Name, please enter a URL-friendly value with a maximum length of 100 characters. A good value could be: my-organization.
  • Organization Unit Name, enter any value
  • Common name, this should correspond to the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of your Inway, we will use my-organization.nl for this guide. For an Outway this FQDN does not have to be resolvable. It is possible to use the Inway certificate for the Outway and NLX Management.
  • Email Address, enter any value
  • Organization Serial Number (optional), enter a serial number with a maximum length of 20 characters. Also make sure this value is unique for the network in the directory overview as we do not check for uniqueness.
  • A challenge password, leave empty

The output should contain the answers you've provided when you created the certificate.

Example of the output: Subject: C=nl, ST=zuid-holland, L=gemeente-stijns, O=my-organization, OU=my-organization-unit, CN=an-awesome-organization.nl/serialNumber=01234567890123456789.

The value after serialNumber= in the Subject's CN field is the primary way to identify your organization on NLX. For details about this, see the organization identification page.

In sum​

All required certificates are available now. So far, we have:

  • Generated the internal certificates for internal communication between components like Inway and Management API
  • Downloaded the NLX Demo CA root certificate
  • Generated our own certificate and private key, so we are allowed to communicate with the API's on the NLX network.

Now let's get up and running to make sure you have all software installed to get started.