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Cockpit usually requires that web browsers communicate with it using HTTPS, for security reasons.
Cockpit listens for both HTTP and HTTPS connections on the same port, by default 9090. If an HTTP connection is made, Cockpit will redirect that connection to HTTPS. There are some exceptions:
If an HTTP connection comes from localhost (127.0.0.1 or
        ::1, then Cockpit will allow communication without redirecting to HTTPS.
Certain URLs, like /ping are not required to use
        HTTPS.
This behavior can be overridden by setting the
      AllowUnencrypted option in cockpit.conf.
Cockpit will load a certificate from the /etc/cockpit/ws-certs.d,
    directory, or below $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS if set (see
      cockpit.conf).
      It will use the last file with a .cert or .crt
      extension in alphabetical order. The file should contain one or more OpenSSL
      style BEGIN CERTIFICATE blocks for the server certificate and
      the intermediate certificate authorities.
      The private key must be contained in a separate file with the same name as the
      certificate, but with a .key suffix instead. The key must not be
      encrypted.
If no certificate is found, a self-signed certificate is created and
      stored in the 0-self-signed.cert file. On some
      platforms, Cockpit will also generate a ca.crt in that directory, which
      may be safely imported into client browsers.
Cockpit will read the files as root, so they can have tight permissions.
To check which certificate cockpit-ws will use run
      the following command.
$ sudo /usr/libexec/cockpit-certificate-ensure --check
Or, on Debian-based systems:
$ sudo /usr/lib/cockpit/cockpit-certificate-ensure --check
If using certmonger to manage certificates, following command can
    be used to automatically prepare a certificate/key file pair:
getcert request -f /etc/cockpit/ws-certs.d/50-certmonger.cert \
                -k /etc/cockpit/ws-certs.d/50-certmonger.key \
                -D myhostname.example.com \
                [--ca=...]
This will not work on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 by default. Adjust the SELinux type of the certificate directory to cert_t to allow certmonger to write its certificates there:
semanage fcontext -a -t cert_t '/etc/cockpit/ws-certs\.d(/.*)?' restorecon -v /etc/cockpit/ws-certs.d