Question

How to get the SSL certificate details for a specific domain via the command line?

Hi all,

If you wanted to see the SSL certificate information for a specific website, you could do that via your browser, by clicking on the green padlock and then click on Certificate which would open a modal with all of the information about the SSL certificate like the Common Names, the Organization that issued the certificate, the expiry date and etc.

get the SSL certificate details for a specific domain via the command line

Here’s how to do the same thing via your command line directly!


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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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November 29, 2020
Accepted Answer

In order to get the SSL information for a specific domain name you can use the openssl command:

  1. echo | openssl s_client -servername yourdomain.com -connect yourdomain.com:443

This would return a lot of information, which could then filter through and get the information that you need.

Another thing you could do is to put this into a small Bash script and filter through the information that you need only. You could check this Bash SSL checker tool here on GitHub.

The script provides you with the following information:

  • The domain name that the SSL certificate has been issued for
  • The number of days the SSL certificate expires in:
  • The dates when the certificate was issued on and expires on
  • The certificate has been issued by:
  • Supported TLS versions
  • Certificate Fingerprint

In order to download the script, run:

  1. wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bobbyiliev/bash-ssl-checker-tool/master/ssl

Then to run the script make it executable:

  1. chmod +x ssl

And then run it for your domain name:

  1. ./ssl yourdomain.com

The output that you would get will look like this:

The bobbyiliev.com domain name seems valid.

# The SSL certificate has been issued for:
Domain: CN = bobbyiliev.com
----

# The SSL certificate expires in:
90 days
----

# Dates:
Issued On: Jun  4 09:05:19 2020 GMT
Expires On: Sep  2 09:05:19 2020 GMT
----

# The certificate has been issued by:
Issuer: C = US, O = Let's Encrypt, CN = Let's Encrypt Authority X3
----

# TLS supported:
|   TLSv1.0:
|   TLSv1.1:
|   TLSv1.2:
----

# Fingerprint:
SHA1 Fingerprint=C1:E1:6C:46:8A:74:94:14:00:94:88:B9:4B:2B:C5:90:79:DE:72:64
----

Here is a quick demo:

get the SSL certificate details for a specific domain via the command line

I hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby

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