Install Nginx HTTP Server Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with Let’s Encrypt free SSL/TLS Certificates
I have been playing around with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS … I have it installed as a guest machine on VMware Workstation 14 Pro… This test shows how to install Nginx with Let’s Encrypt support on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS…
Let’s Encrypt is Certificate Authority (CA) that provides free SSL/TLS certificates to anyone who owns a valid domain or website. This brief tutorial shows students and new users how set Nginx server block up to use the free certificates provided by Let’s Encrypt CA.
Let’s Encrypt also provide a tool that automate this process on Linux systems. With the client, it’s easy to obtain, renew and manage the certificates. This process has gotten to good that the entire process can be automated with Apache2 and Nginx webservers.
To setup Nginx websites to use Let’s Encrypt free SSL/TLS certificates, follow the steps below:
Step 1: Setup Nginx Server Block
To enable Let’s Encrypt to automatically install its free SSL/TLS certificates on your Ubuntu server running Nginx, configure the website configuration file with the appropriate domain names you want to use for SSL/TLS.
Open the website configuration file and make sure it contains the domain names you want to obtain the free SSL/TLS certificates for.
sudu nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com
Then the file should have a highlighted line defining your domain name.
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
}
Save the file and close out.
Step 2: Install Let’s Encrypt Client
To get Let’s Encrypt free SSL/TLS certificates on your Ubuntu machine, you should first install it’s client. The client helps automate the process for you. To install it, run the commands below.
sudo apt-get install python-certbot-nginx
Step 3: Obtaining your free Certificates
Now that you’ve install Let’s Encrypt cert client and have configured the Nginx website with the appropriate domain name, continue below to obtain the certificates. To do that, run the commands below
sudo certbot --nginx -m webmaster@example.com -d example.com -d www.example.com
After running the above commands, you should get prompted to accept the licensing terms. If everything is checked, the client should automatically install the free SSL/TLS certificate and configure the Nginx site to use the certs.
Please read the Terms of Service at
https://letsencrypt.org/documents/LE-SA-v1.2-November-15-2017.pdf. You must
agree in order to register with the ACME server at
https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(A)gree/(C)ancel: A
Choose Yes ( Y ) to share your email address
Would you be willing to share your email address with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a founding partner of the Let's Encrypt project and the non-profit
organization that develops Certbot? We'd like to send you email about EFF and
our work to encrypt the web, protect its users and defend digital rights.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Y)es/(N)o: Y
This is how easy is it to obtain your free SSL/TLS certificate for your Nginx powered website.
Please choose whether or not to redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS, removing HTTP access. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1: No redirect - Make no further changes to the webserver configuration. 2: Redirect - Make all requests redirect to secure HTTPS access. Choose this for new sites, or if you're confident your site works on HTTPS. You can undo this change by editing your web server's configuration. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Select the appropriate number [1-2] then [enter] (press 'c' to cancel): 2
Pick option 2 to redirect all traffic over HTTPS. This is important!
After that, the SSL client should install the cert and configure your website to redirect all traffic over HTTPS.
Congratulations! You have successfully enabled https://example.com and https://www.example.com You should test your configuration at: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=example.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.example.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT NOTES: - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem Your key file has been saved at: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem Your cert will expire on 2018-02-24. To obtain a new or tweaked version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot again with the "certonly" option. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run "certbot renew" - If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by: Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/donate Donating to EFF: https://eff.org/donate-le
Finally, restart Nginx.
sudo systemctl restart nginx.service
If everything is configured correctly, you website should be configured and accepting all traffic over HTTPS.
Let’s encrypt should add the below lines at the bottom of your Nginx site config file.
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
root /var/www/html/example.com;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
client_max_body_size 100M;
..................
..................
listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot
if ($scheme != "https") {
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
} # managed by Certbot
# Redirect non-https traffic to https
# if ($scheme != "https") {
# return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
# } # managed by Certbot
}
You’ll have to manually renew the certificates. You’ll get email reminder to reset when the certificates are about to expire. To test the renewal process run the commands below.
sudo certbot renew --dry-run
To setup a process to automatically renew the certificates, add a cron job to execute the renewal process.
sudo crontab -e
Then add the line below and save.
0 1 * * * /usr/bin/certbot renew & > /dev/null
The cron job will attempt to renew 30 days before expiring
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