Nginx - setting up SSL with existing .crt, .key and CA.pem files - ssl

Question

I have a .crt, .key and CA.pem files that were generated like this.
These certs are kind of project-wide, and they work when firing up a webpack-dev-server server on HTTPS like:
devServer: {
https: {
key: fs.readFileSync('/path/to/example.com.key'),
cert: fs.readFileSync('/path/to/examle.com.crt'),
ca: fs.readFileSync('/path/to/CA.pem'),
}
}
Now I need to setup an Nginx server using these 3 files, but I've been trying with no luck. Here's my config:
server {
listen 3000;
ssl_certificate certs/example.com.crt;
ssl_certificate_key certs/example.com.key;
# where does the CA.pem file go??
}
The result of this is Chrome giving me a
This site can’t provide a secure connection
example.com sent an invalid response.
ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR
Nginx logs show random hex characters:
172.18.0.1 - - [14/Dec/2018:18:01:55 +0000] "\x16\x03\x01\x00\xDD\x01\x00\x00\xD9\x03\x03\xAB\xE1\xB3\x1F\xCE\x02\x02\xC5}q\xDFgd\xF1`\xC1m\x8E\x99\xCE' \x98\xDF\xDEEg\x8Fm\xED\x9F\xB1\x00\x00\x1C" 400 166 "-" "-" "-" 0.001 -
Any ideas what could I be doing wrong?

Answer 1

You need to concatenate your certificate with CA for nginx:
cp example.com.crt example.com.fullchain.pem
cat CA.pem >> example.com.fullchain.pem
and use this file in nginx config:
ssl_certificate certs/example.com.fullchain.pem;