NAME

update-ca-certificates – update /etc/ssl/certs and certificates.crt  

SYNOPSIS

update-ca-certificates [options]  

DESCRIPTION

This manual page documents briefly the update-ca-certificates command.

update-ca-certificates is a program that updates the directory /etc/ssl/certs to hold SSL certificates and generates certificates.crt, a concatenated single-file list of certificates.

It reads the file /etc/ca-certificates.conf. Each line gives a pathname of a CA certificate under /usr/share/ca-certificates that should be trusted. Lines that begin with "#" are comment lines and thus ignored. Lines that begin with "!" are deselected, causing the deactivation of the CA certificate in question. Certificates must have a .crt extension in order to be included by update-ca-certificates.

Furthermore all certificates with a .crt extension found below /usr/local/share/ca-certificates are also included as implicitly trusted.

Before terminating, update-ca-certificates invokes run-parts on /etc/ca-certificates/update.d and calls each hook with a list of certificates: those added are prefixed with a +, those removed are prefixed with a -.  

OPTIONS

A summary of options is included below.
-h, –help
Show summary of options.
-v, –verbose
Be verbose. Output c_rehash.
-f, –fresh
Fresh updates. Remove symlinks in /etc/ssl/certs directory.
 

FILES

/etc/ca-certificates.conf
A configuration file.
/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
A single-file version of CA certificates. This holds all CA certificates that you activated in /etc/ca-certificates.conf.
/usr/share/ca-certificates
Directory of CA certificates.
/usr/local/share/ca-certificates
Directory of local CA certificates (with .crt extension).
 

Willie has over 15 years of experience in Linux system administration and DevOps. After managing infrastructure for startups and enterprises alike, he founded Command Linux to share the practical knowledge he wished he had when starting out. He oversees content strategy and contributes guides on server management, automation, and security.