An exercise in bad documentation

Last modified by Mitchell on 2022/01/25 03:01

I'm... irritated. I've just spent several hours trying to figure out how to have Jetty use an SSL certificate generated wholly externally, all because the Jetty documentation is... less than complete.

The start line:

  • One PKCS12 file with a X.509 certificate, its private key, and its chain of trust, encrypted with a password.
    • Generated from Windows Server, but the answer isn't "Don't use Windows". Yes, it's sometimes a perfectly valid answer. But not this time.

Things not obvious:

  • jetty-ssl.xml refers to KeyStorePassword (easy enough), KeyManagerPassword (what's that?), and TrustStorePassword (huh?).
  • The Jetty instructions for importing a PKCS12 file only talk about keystore passwords. But that leads to a situation where Jetty complains it can't read the necessary keys.
  • If you'd like to leverage the default Java Jetty keystore (particularly if you have a secure system), you need to know the keystore's password. Which isn't provided anywhere... although an Internet search will tell you.
  • After much digging around, maybe it's because for the key pair, the private key can have a password? Except having a blank password doesn't work, and setting it to the keystore's password doesn't work. Odd.
  • The SSL documentation for Jetty 8 refers to a key pair password. What happened to that configuration key?
  • So... somehow, "password" became "KeyManagerPassword". But what's the default password for that? It takes another Internet search to find that. Or maybe you're just supposed to look in the source code?

Spending several hours over this makes me not happy.

P.S. There's conveniently a command to import a PKCS12 file directly into a keystore. You can use it to rename the key in the process, since Jetty wants a key called... jetty.