How to create a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) OWIN Selfhosted

Question

Would I use the IIS Manager to create this CSR even though the web application is not hosted in IIS?

I have a .Net app using NancyFX that is self hosted using Microsoft.Owin.Hosting (so IIS is not used at all) and I need to create a CSR for the production server, but can't seem to find any details on how to do this.

I've tried creating the CSR using the Certificates MMC plugin, but it was rejected by the issuer due to missing Common name, Country, City/locality, Organization, State/province and an incorrect key size.

This is the first time that I need to create a CSR so I have no idea of how to do this.

Answer 1

To generate a CSR on Windows without IIS you can use OpenSSL. Download it for Windows from https://www.openssl.org/

Run the following openssl command (via run or cmd.exe)

openssl req -out CSR.csr -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout private.key

And when you run the openssl req cmd, it will generate a CSR (with a public key embedded) and a private key.