haproxy - unable to load SSL private key from PEM file

Question

haproxy does not start anymore, it shows the error

bind :443\' : unable to load SSL private key from PEM file ...

We did not change a

Answer 1

The problem for me was a strange character at the beginning of the key.

This character did not show up when I cated the file because the character was otherwise known as the UTF-8 BOM (Byte Order Mark). It only showed up when I opened the file in vim.

I wouldn't expect this to be very common, but hopefully it saves someone some headache.