If you want not to be prompted for the password when starting apache with SSL just change the directive SSLPassPhraseDialog in the configuration file of ssl_mod pointing to a program that writes the password to stdout like this (in the file /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ssl.conf):
SSLPassPhraseDialog exec:/root/bin/passphrase
… where /root/bin/passphrase is a program that contains this lines:
#!/usr/bin/perl
print “yourpassn”;
I gave this perms to the file but I don’t know how necessary it is:
-rwxr-x— 1 root www-data 37 Jan 19 16:43 passphrase