Skipping pass phrase requirement while restarting a server

There are a lot of times we need to write automated script which can start/restart a server when ever required. Or generally if we are restarting the server quite a lot of time (maybe for testing purpose), we are prompted to enter pass phrase if we have installed  libapache-mod-ssl and have configured with any one of the domains on the server.

So, sometimes we feel the need of skipping the pass phrase prompt. Here is what we need to do:
1. Remove the encryption from the RSA private key (we will also preserve the original file):
$ cp server.key serverOld.key
$ openssl rsa -in serverOld.key -out server.key
2. We should make sure that server.key is only readable by root by:
$ chmod 400 server.key

After this we won’t be prompted for pass phrase every time we restart the server.