The Customer Portal allows your Customers to log in to their accounts to pay bills, view pending Tickets, confirm historical usage and more! However modern web browsers will flag your website as insecure without an externally authenticated SSL Certificate. This SSL Certificate may also be used for the Employee Portal to prevent the same warnings internally.

How To Obtain an SSL Certificate

You can acquire an SSL Certificate from a Certificate Authority. These companies are also often domain or hosting providers like GoDaddy. Others like LetsEncrypt offer only SSL Certification services.The Powercode Billing server uses an Apache ssl certificate, and https if your domain provider requests a protocol.

Certificate Providers that do not use another form of authentication will require that you generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) and a private key file.

Generate your CSR and Key

You will need to know the following information:

  • Country Name: 2 letter code
  • State or Province Name: Full name
  • Locality Name: City name
  • Organization Name: Company name
  • Organizational Unit Name: Section or department (Engineering, Sales, etc)
  • Common Name: Your server’s domain name. IF INCORRECT CERTIFICATE WILL NEED TO BE REBUILT
  • Email Address

One of the most important inputs is the Common Name. If you are unsure what this should be consult documentation provided by your certificate provider.

  • For single SSL Certificates Common Name should take the form of yourdomainname.com 
  • for wildcard SSL Certificates Common Name takes the form of *.yourdomainname.com.

Generate your files:

  • Use SSH to access your Billing Server via the command line and run the following command to generate a new CSR: 
    openssl req -out CSR.csr -new -newkey rsa:4096 -nodes -keyout privateKey.key
    • You will be asked to enter information specific to the website you are licensing.
  • Use the following command to generate your new private Key: 
    openssl rsa -in privateKey.key -out newPrivateKey.key
  • Use the command “pwd” and note your current filepath. This is the location of your CSR file and new Private Key
  • You should see a file named CSR.csr. This is your Certificate Signing Request. You may use a method of your choosing to transfer your CSR file to your Certificate Authority.

SSL Certificate Installation

If your team is capable of installing the certificate to the nginx server underlying Powercode version 19+ you may. If you are not comfortable installing an SSL Certificate we recommend requesting assistance from Powercode Support. An incorrectly installed SSL Certificate may bring down your Customer Portal and Employee Portal.

To request an SSL Certificate installation from Powercode Support please send the following to support@powercode.com

  • Any certificate files: certificate providers may provide a zip file, or any number of files as part of your certificate.
  • Your newPrivateKey.key file path

Many Certificate providers have custom certificate installation processes. If this is the case with your provider Powercode Support may have followup questions. If not Powercode Support can generally install an SSL Certificate within two business days of submission.