I’ve just been through the process of configuring SSL on Apache. I was going to say it’s a little like burning yourself with a cigarette, but that would be mercifully quick, and this was more of a long drawn-out chinese water torture kind of pain. Please bear in mind I don’t yet know Apache all that well, so anything I say may well be slightly off.
For some legal reason (to do with exporting encryption software from the states) the main installation packages for Windows that you find on the Apache site do not support SSL. Heh. There is a module (mod_ssl) which extends Apache to add support, but it also modifies some of the core product, so requires an Apache build that has been compiled with the module included.
The upshot is, be very careful before installing Apache as the chances are that the version you install (friendly MSI from their site) doesn’t include the SSL module.
Some of the early material I was reading suggested downloading the Apache source, downloading the SSL module, and building an Apache binary to use. Yeah right.
There were two great articles (here and here) that helped me get to the bottom of this. It’s really important to install the correct version, compiled with the SSL module, so definately worth reading up on this before installing Apache. I had to uninstall and put a different build back on to get SSL working.
Overall it took me about a day to get this up and running, and it was incredibly frustrating and foolish. The cool thing is I’m going to have a public Subversion repository hosted in Apache, and properly secured. Seeing as Subversion uses optimistic locking, and keeps track of changes locally, this should make it incredibly easy to work remotely with the repository. I haven’t tried for a while, but I worked on one project I attempted to use Visual Source Safe over a VPN connection, and it was incredibly slow and very chatty.
Anyway, I know it’s a little sad, but I actually think having a publicly accessible version control repository is very cool. In the spectacle wearing emoticon kind of way.
