Generating and obtaining certificates
The below steps require a certain level of technical expertise and in some circumstances, command line access. If you don't have command line access, or are unsure, you can ask your hosting company to perform these steps.
Or get in touch with us and we may be able to do this on your behalf.
The Zoopla documentation explains how authentication works in detail.
Below we'll go over the steps required to generate and upload the certificates to Property Hive.
Generating a CSR and private key
Easy option
The Zoopla feed uses server keys to authenticate any requests sent. You can use a website like CSR Generator to generate the CSR (Certificate Signing Request) and private key:
Once you've completed the information in the form you'll be presented with the certificate and private key in one big block of text:
These should be put into separate files. Put the top section labelled 'certificate request' into one file named something like 'certificate.csr'. This is the file you'll upload to Zoopla in a following step.
The section labelled 'Private Key' should be copied into a text file called 'private.pem' or similar and stored locally. Don't send this to anyone. You'll upload this into the settings area of Property Hive in a latter step.
When copying the text, be sure to copy the lines wrapped with dashes such as ——BEGIN CERTIFICATE REQUEST———
Advanced option
Alternatively with command line access you create these keys on your server.
Whilst on the command line run the following to create private/public key pairs:
openssl genrsa -out private.pem 2048
You'll then need to create a certificate signing request (CSR) like so:
openssl req -new -sha256 -key private.pem -out public.csr
You'll be prompted to complete information about your company during this stage including company name, location, email address and more.
The final bit of information it asks for is a password. Leave this blank.
Upload the CSR
Now we have the CSR (public.csr) you'll need to navigate to Zoopla's certificate signing request submission page and upload it.
This will give you a 12 digit verification code which you should write down somewhere.
Let Zoopla know
Inform Zoopla you've uploaded the CSR and your telephone number.
A member of the Zoopla team will then call you and ask for this code to verify it was you that uploaded the CSR.
Receive and upload the CRT file
Once verified, Zoopla will email through the necessary information that you can enter into Property Hive when setting up a feed.
They'll attach a .CRT file which can be uploaded along with the private.pem file that you generated earlier on.