Extending default validity for self-generated SSL certificates

When I installed GForge recently, I had to generate an SSL certificate as part of the installation since GForge runs on https. However, the make-ssl-cert tool does not provide a way to customize the validity of the generated certificate, which is 30 days by default.

As it turns out, this problem is known for 3 years, and it is still not fixed in Ubuntu 8.04.

The easiest workaround is to edit the make-ssl-cert script using

whereis make-ssl-cert
sudo nano [path-to/]make-ssl-cert

and replace the line

openssl req -config $TMPFILE -new -x509 -nodes -out $output
    -keyout $output

with

openssl req -config $TMPFILE -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes
    -out $output -keyout $output

That’s it.