Adding SSL to your CHILI server

With the End of Life of CHILI publisher (On Premise) this information is obsolete, and only kept as reference.

CHILI publisher now lives on as GraFx Publisher in the platform of CHILI GraFx

CHILI Backoffice and the CHILI Web Services are just web applications, which means that we can host them in many ways. More specifically, CHILI Backoffice and CHILI Web Services are C# applications and therefor they are hosted by default on a Microsoft IIS web server on Windows. And it means we can manage it from that server.

Many times, CHILI publish is asked if we support SSL to host the Backoffice and Web Services on HTTPS. And we're happy to say yes. We do support SSL. Well, actually, IIS does.

This page will describe how you can configure your own server to support SSL.

Step-by-step guide

Disclaimer

This webpage and guide is describing the configuration steps in a third party system that has not been developed by CHILI publish. We are providing this documentation as an extra service to our customers. Please check the Microsoft Documentation for updates and more information for more specific cases. CHILI does not support any questions regarding SSL setup or IIS configuration as this is not our product.

Pre-requisites

Make sure that you have a valid SSL Certificate from a trusted CA (Certificate Authority)
1. For example: https://letsencrypt.org/ provides free certificates

Self-Signed certificates

Like the documentation states above, you can only use a valid SSL Certificate, because the CHILI server will validate the certificate when it needs to contact it's own web services. So self-signed certificates will cause some features of the server to not work properly.

_{Symptoms of this problem: PDF or preview generation will cause the DocumentSaveXML subtask to fail because it fails to load the necessary files on the server. The Editor CLI logs will seemingly wait eternally for the document to load.}

Installing the SSL certificate in Microsoft IIS

Open IIS Manager
Select the server in the Connections Panel for which you wish to install the Server Certificate
Go to IIS > Server Certificates and double click the Icon
Import your certificate by clicking on the 'Import...' action

Enabling SSL for the CHILI application

In the IIS Manager, select the Site that is hosting the CHILI application (most of the times this is the Default Web Site)
Add a new binding by clicking on the 'Bindings...' in the Actions panel
Click the Add... button to add a new binding
Add an HTTPS binding for the necessary IP addresses and select the newly added certificate
The binding is now added, you can now close the Bindings window and test the HTTPS connection

You're ready to go!