Want to encrypt traffic to your website or blog on Nginx using SSL/TLS certificate for free? Apparently using SSL/TLS on your websites is very important to Google and other search engines. This brief tutorial is going to show students and new users how to use Let’s Encrypt free SSL/TLS certificates to encrypt traffic to your websites running on Nginx webservers
We currently use Let’s Encrypt certificates on all our websites and blogs. They’re free and work pretty much like any other certificates from other certificate providers.
When you want to install and use Let’s Encrypt certificates for your websites running Nginx, continue with the steps below:
Step 1: Installing Let’s Encrypt Certificate Package
Step one of this is to install Let’s Encrypt packages on the Ubuntu server. This can be done many ways. A quicker way is to add the PPA below and install the packages from there.
sudo apt update sudo apt install software-properties-common sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
Step 2: Installing the packages for Nginx
Now that the PPA is added, run the commands below to install the Let’s Encrypt packages designed for Nginx webserver settings.
sudo apt update sudo apt install python-certbot-nginx
Step 3: Installing a Certificate
After installing Let’s Encrypt package above, run the commands below to create a new certificate for the domain you which to protect. When you run the commands below, it will prompt you with series of questions and prompts.
Use the guide below to answer.
sudo certbot --nginx
The commands above will help you install Let’s Encrypt certificates for websites running on Nginx webservers.
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log Enter email address (used for urgent renewal and security notices) (Enter 'c' to cancel): your@email.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please read the Terms of Service at https://letsencrypt.org/documents/LE-SA-v1.1.1-August-1-2016.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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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: N Which names would you like to activate HTTPS for? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1: example.com 2: mydomain.com 3: sub.example.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Select the appropriate numbers separated by commas and/or spaces, or leave input blank to select all options shown (Enter 'c' to cancel): 1 Obtaining a new certificate Performing the following challenges: tls-sni-01 challenge for example.com Waiting for verification... Cleaning up challenges Deployed Certificate to VirtualHost /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.com for set(['example.com']) 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 The appropriate server block is already redirecting traffic. To enable redirect anyway, uncomment the redirect lines in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Congratulations! You have successfully enabled https://example.com You should test your configuration at: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=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 2017-11-18. 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" - Your account credentials have been saved in your Certbot configuration directory at /etc/letsencrypt. You should make a secure backup of this folder now. This configuration directory will also contain certificates and private keys obtained by Certbot so making regular backups of this folder is ideal. - 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
Done.. if everything goes as planned, the domain you selected should be protected suing Let’s Encrypt SSL/TLS.
Step 4: Renewing the Certificates
Let’s Encrypt certificates expire every 90 days or less. You may have to renew everytime before they expire. To renew, run the commands below
Do a try run first.
sudo certbot renew --dry-run
Then run the commands below to renew the certificate for another 90 days.
certbot renew
To automate this process, edit the crontab and add the line below.
sudo crontab -e
0 4 15 * * /usr/bin/certbot renew
Enjoy!
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