Below, we assume that the FQDN ssp.unit.ox.ac.uk has already been registered as a DNS entry. You will need to do this, as https://localhost/my-service/ will not work, even just for testing.
You'll also need to obtain a valid Certificate Authority signed digital certificate and install that along with the openssl package. See Certificates for more on the certificate service.
For testing however, you could also just use the default certificate (/etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem). See the Apache2 configuration files and especially /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl for detailed instructions on correctly configuring a secure https host.
Install Apache2 and enable the ssl modules:
sudo apt-get install apache2 sudo a2enmod ssl sudo a2ensite default-ssl
The next step is to create a directory which will contain (at least) the main index.html page for the protected site. Depending on your system version, these should be under /var/www for older versions or /var/www/html for more recent versions. Check the DocumentRoot entry in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl.
Create the site directory: sudo mkdir /var/www/my-service
or depending on DocumentRoot,
sudo mkdir /var/www/html/my-service
Create an index.html file, say /var/www/html/my-service/index.html, to contain something like:
<html> <body> <h1>My Secure Site</h1> </body> </html>
Next, edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default-ssl and set/add the following within the VirtualHost section:
ServerName ssp.unit.ox.ac.uk # use your own FQDN
and add:
Alias /my-service/ /var/www/html/my-service/ <Location /my-service/> # nothing here for now </Location>
Now, you can test that your basic secure site works correctly:
sudo service apache2 restart
From a browser, check that <span>https</span>://ssp.unit.ox.ac.uk/my-service/ opens the above index.html page.
