To get certs up and running: 1) Follow the first step from this page – it will walk you through the creation of a new certificate 1a) Download the MIT CA certificate from https://ca.mit.edu/mitca.crt and copy it somewhere 2) Install nginx 3) Setup the nginx conf file to be similar to the provied file. Basically, you want to redirect requests to rails, and add the certificate information to the header. 4) Start nginx 5) Install thin with 'gem install thin' 6) cd into the fanfic directory, start thin with thin start -s3 -p 3000. This starts 3 servers to decrease response time NOTE: If you are trying to maintan this on the pants and it has NOT been upgraded from 10.04 yet, you'll have a fun time. I was using the command `killall -9 ruby; rvm 1.9.2 do rails server -e production -d` to restart the rails server. Ideally I would just be able to use thin, but that decided to not work. The nginx configuration file is in /usr/local/nginx/conf/sites-available/fanfic. Nginx takes care of the certificate authentication, adds some information to the http header, then fowards the requset to the thin server on port 3000.