CSR Generation: Tomcat or Apache?

Question

While not entirely programming related. I recently purchased a SSL certificate, and during the configuration I need to generate as CSR.

I am running Tomcat behind Apache via mod_jk. I see two options for generating the CSR one for Apache and one for Java based servers. My question is which do i use? At the moment the site needing the SSL is configured to have all requests forwared straight to Tomcat for processing. This however may change to only certain pages. Does it make a difference?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you are going to use mod_jk then the SSL cert should be generated for apache. mod_jk connects to tomcat over the APR protocol (default 8009) so all SSL handling is done by Apache. This works nice since, in the future, you may only want to proxy dynamic content with mod_jk, assigning the cert to Apache will allow you to proxy static content using HTTPS.

Fyi, the thread you referenced only discussed whether you had to generate the keypair and cert request on the same machine and is not related to running tomcat + apache + SSL. That thread is not relevant to your question.