Hey everyone, In this blog, I'll show you my second method of
getting a free SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt.
I'll also be using Nginx but you're free to use any other
software you prefer like Apache for example.
There are multiple methods to achieve this. In
my previous blog I
showed one way of doing this, and in this blog, I'll show another
method (it will take a bit longer since it depends on
DNS propagation).
Those are the methods that I prefer and find easy to
implement.
As we did before, let's start by preparing our web server to serve a
hello world
html page!
For this demo, I'll be using an AWS EC2 instance with a
public IP address and GoDaddy as my domain name
registrar.
Steps:
ssh.
sudo su
yum update -y
yum install nginx
systemctl start nginx
These commands will update your instance,
install nginx, and start the server.
You can verify that your server is running by navigating to your
instance public ip address (for example http://xx.xx.xx.xx) and you
should be able to see the Nginx server default page.
If you're using AWS EC2 like me in this blog, make sure that
your assigned security groups and NACLs are not
blocking traffic on port 80.
Okay, now we have our web server up and running, let's make our
domain name point to our web server.
To do that, simply create an
A record with the
value of your public IP address.
Once you're able to access your web server through your domain, you're ready to request a certificate from Let's Encrypt.
Now, we're ready to request a certificate:
Install certbot-nginx
sudo apt install certbot
sudo yum install certbot -y
Obtain your certificate using this command
certbot certonly --manual --preferred-challenges=dns -d
yourdomain.com
Follow along the wizard; you will create 1
TXT record per sub-domain in your domain name
registrar (GoDaddy).
Once you're done, you will have your certificates ready to use
and stored in /etc/letsencrypt/live/{your-domain}.
Update you nginx server configs to use your new certificate.
server {
listen 80;
server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;
# Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}
server {
listen 443 ssl;
server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;
ssl_certificate
/etc/letsencrypt/live/yourdomain.com/fullchain.pem; # Path
to your SSL certificate
ssl_certificate_key
/etc/letsencrypt/live/yourdomain.com/privkey.pem; # Path to
your private key
# Optional: SSL settings for better security
ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
ssl_ciphers 'HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5';
location / {
root /var/www/html; # Path to your web root
index index.html index.htm index.php;
}
# Additional location blocks can go here
}
Reload your nginx server
sudo systemctl reload nginx
Now, you should be able to access your website using HTTPS.
Again, if you're using AWS EC2 with assigned
security groups and NACLs, make sure you allow traffic
on port 443.
That's it for this blog; hope you find it helpful!