Configure SSL/TLS with Let's Encrypt and enforce HTTPS on Your Web Application - IT'S FREE

Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority (CA) that provides an easy way to obtain and install free TLS/SSL certificates, thereby enabling encrypted HTTPS on web servers. It simplifies the process by providing a software client, Certbot, that attempts to automate most (if not all) of the required steps. Currently, the entire process of obtaining and installing a certificate is fully automated on both Apache and Nginx.

We will use Certbot to obtain a free SSL certificate for Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04 and set up our certificate to renew automatically.

Installing Certbot

Install Certbot and its Nginx plugin with apt

$ sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx

Allowing HTTPS Through the Firewall

To additionally let in HTTPS traffic, allow the Nginx Full profile and delete the redundant Nginx HTTP profile allowance:

$ sudo ufw allow 'Nginx Full'

$ sudo ufw delete allow 'Nginx HTTP'

Verify the rules by typing:

$ sudo ufw status

You should see only 'Nginx Full'. 

Obtaining an SSL Certificate

Certbot provides a variety of ways to obtain SSL certificates through plugins. The Nginx plugin will take care of reconfiguring Nginx and reloading the config whenever necessary. To use this plugin, type the following:

$ sudo certbot --nginx -d example.com -d www.example.com

If this is your first time running certbot, you will be prompted to enter an email address and agree to the terms of service. After doing so, certbot will communicate with the Let’s Encrypt server, then run a challenge to verify that you control the domain you’re requesting a certificate for.

If that’s successful, certbot will ask how you’d like to configure your HTTPS settings.

Output:

 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):

Select your choice then hit ENTER. Of course, you are here because of HTTPS redirect. It will be better to select option 2. That way, if people visit your site with HTTP, they will be automatically redirected to a more secured connection. The configuration will be updated, and Nginx will reload to pick up the new settings. certbot will wrap up with a message telling you the process was successful and where your certificates are stored:

Continuation of the output:

 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 2020-08-18. 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" - 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

Verifying Certbot Auto-Renewal

Let’s Encrypt’s certificates are only valid for ninety days. This is to encourage users to automate their certificate renewal process. The certbot package we installed takes care of this for us by adding a systemd timer that will run twice a day and automatically renew any certificate that’s within thirty days of expiration.

You can query the status of the timer with systemctl:

$ sudo systemctl status certbot.timer

#output

 ● certbot.timer - Run certbot twice daily Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/certbot.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: active (waiting) since Mon 2020-05-04 20:04:36 UTC; 2 weeks 1 days ago Trigger: Thu 2021-08-21 06:47:33 UTC; 9h left Triggers: ● certbot.service

To test the renewal process, you can do a dry run with certbot:

$ sudo certbot renew --dry-run

If you see no errors, you’re all set. When necessary, Certbot will renew your certificates and reload Nginx to pick up the changes. If the automated renewal process ever fails, Let’s Encrypt will send a message to the email you specified, warning you when your certificate is about to expire.

How to delete the certificates

To delete the certificates, click on the link below to the tutorial: https://www.ktechhub.com/tutorials/managing-let-s-encrypt-certificates-with-certbot-how-to-delete-and-more

Mumuni Mohammed

Experienced DevOps Engineer proficient in Python, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud technologies. Specialized in automating processes and building scalable infrastructure for seamless development and deployment.