From: yermej <yermej@...>
Date: 2009-09-04T10:35:16+09:00
Subject: Re: How do I decode/parse a X509 SSL Cert

On Sep 3, 3:43 pm, marc spitzer <ms4...@sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Did a bit of googleing on this and did not have much luck.
> I would like to connect to a ssl webserver and download the
> cert.  Then I would like to decode the cert and pares out some
> fields of interest, host name and expire date, and make it a
> report that gets mailed out weekly.  
>
> My question is what would be the best way to get and decode the
> cert?

Sorry, I forgot to answer the first part of the question. And I was
less sure of that anyway. This should do it though:

require 'net/https'

host = 'www.example.com'
port = 443
path = '/'

http = Net::HTTP.new(host, port)
http.use_ssl = true

http.start(path) do |conn|
  cert = OpenSSL::X509::Certificate.new conn.peer_cert
  cert.not_after
  cert.subject
end

There are some useful files in the Ruby tarball in sample/openssl if
you'll be using Ruby OpenSSL very much.