certs

Demo Certificates

This directory contains certificates used by the clients and servers in our sample programs. These certificates are for testing purposes only and should never be used in a production environment.

As provided, the server certificates use 127.0.0.1 for the Common Name, the IP address and DNS name. This works fine when you run the client and server on the same host. However, if you want to run them on separate hosts, you may need to regenerate the certificates. (This is especially true for the JavaScript examples.)

We've included the Python script makedemocerts.py to simplify this task.

Prerequisites

You'll need Python to run the script. The script also depends on a utility package from a separate ZeroC repository. You can install this package as follows:

pip install "zeroc-icecertutils >= 1.0.4"

Usage

Running the script with -h displays the following usage information:

Usage: certs/makedemocerts.py [options]

Options:
-h               Show this message.
-d | --debug     Debugging output.
--ip <ip>        The IP address for the server certificate.
--dns <dns>      The DNS name for the server certificate.
--use-dns        Use the DNS name for the server certificate common
                 name (default is to use the IP address).

The --ip, --dns, and --use-dns options affect the generation of the server certificate. Without any arguments, the script prompts for the value of the IP address and DNS name.

You can specify an alternate IP address using --ip and an alternate DNS name using --dns. The --use-dns flag forces the script to use the DNS name as the server's Common Name instead of the IP address.