Generate openSSL certificates from within C code using commands?

Question

This is an openSSL command for generating a private key and a certificate,

openssl req -out CSR.csr -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout privateKey.key

The question I have is whether there is some way to run this command within an executable compiled from C?

Answer 1

In C system() function executes an internal operating system command. If the command execution is terminated the command processor will give the control back to the program that has called the system command.

It takes a C String as a parameter.as an example

int main ()
{
char c[50];
strcpy( c, "command string" );
system(c);
return 0;
} 

You can see the man page here

Answer 2

If you want to have your program call another executable, than it would be required to be installed on the system (it's open source so in most cases you should be able to ship or incorporate somehow). OpenSSL also provides some libraries for programmers, see the C Header files documentation.

Here are some tutorials about progamming with OpenSSL:

• Windows Server OpenSSL tutorial
• Make a Cert
• Many code samples

May also want to search and check over on Stack Overflow.