Why I am getting the "./demoCA/newcerts: No such file or directory" error when running OpenSSL "ca" command?

If you are running the OpenSSL "ca" command installed with the slproweb binary package for Windows, you may get the "./demoCA/newcerts: No such file or directory" error as shown below:

C:\Users\fyicenter>\local\OpenSSL-Win32\bin\openssl.exe

OpenSSL> ca -in test.csr -keyfile my_ca.key -cert my_ca.crt
Using configuration from C:\local\OpenSSL-Win32\bin\openssl.cfg
Enter pass phrase for my_ca.key:fyicenter
I am unable to access the ./demoCA/newcerts directory
./demoCA/newcerts: No such file or directory
error in ca

This error is caused by the "dir=./demoCA" and "certs=$dir/certs" options in the configuration file. These options requires you to have a sub directory called "\demoCA\certs" under the current directory to save output signed certificates. This is needed even if you specify the output file name with the "-out" option.

Fixing this error is easy. Just create the sub directory: ./demoCA/newcerts, as shown below:

C:\Users\fyicenter>mkdir demoCA
C:\Users\fyicenter>mkdir demoCA\newcerts

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