pyCA - Installing

Requirements

For running these scripts you need:

• A Unix-like operating system (e.g. Linux, I would like to hear reports of pyCA running on other systems).
• OpenSSL 0.9.4+

For running the CGI-BIN programs you need:

• Web server with CGI-BIN support, e.g. Apache or preferrably a web server with SSL support like ApacheSSL or Apache with mod_ssl.
• One of the following web browsers:
  • Netscape Navigator or Opera
    using the <KEYGEN>-tag for the asymmetric key generation
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 or above (IE 3 will be not supported)

For using LDAP as a certificates repository you need:

• LDAP Server (e.g. OpenLDAP) configured to store certificate attributes
• python-ldap which needs OpenLDAP to build

Ready-to-use packages of the required software in current Linux distributions:

• The Linux distribution S.u.S.E. already has RPM packages of Python, OpenSSL, Apache with mod_ssl, Netscape Navigator, OpenLDAP and ldapmodule (since 6.2) for Python.
• Red Hat has included the Python interpreter with their Linux distribution. You might consider to grab some pre-packaged RPMs of OpenLDAP and ldapmodule.
• There is a Debian package of pyCA itself. The Debian-Release (nickname Potato) includes packages of OpenSSL, Python, OpenLDAP and ldapmodule for Python as well as ApacheSSL and Apache with mod_ssl.

Documentation

Some rudimental documentation is available and included in the download archive above.

• Architecural overview
• List of files
• Configuration
• Release history
• Roadmap - plans for enhancing pyCA

Installing

• Install all required software.
• Put the Python programs under cgi-bin/ anywhere in the CGI-BIN directory of your web server.
• Put the Python modules under pylib/ anywhere in your Python path or adjust the list variable pylib in pycacnf.py.
• You have to set up a reasonable OpenSSL configuration file openssl.cnf (see documentation, see example) and adjust variable cnf_filename in pycacnf.py.
• You might want to create a CA hierarchy with ca-make.py.
• call the CGI-BIN program ca-index to show some of the relevant data in your OpenSSL configuration file.