I've started playing around with Google's Cloud Platform recently and one of the first things I wanted to do was to secure my app's static pages so they could be delivered over HTTPS. This meant that I needed to upload my certificate and private key to Google. I went ahead and generated my key as usual and I thought I had an RSA key already, but Google didn't seem to like it.

This was the error I was getting - "The private key that you've seleted does not appear to be valid."


I did some searching around and it appeared that my key had to be converted first. The header of my key started with:


That was a sign that Google wouldn't accept that key. Luckily openssl can easily convert the key to an expected format with the following command:


Now after loading the second, converted, RSA key, Google accepted it without error!



-i