🤖Let's Encrypt + Certbot - Secure your web services with SSL certificates

2024-02-03

Lets Encrypt provides free SSL certificates to secure your web applications over HTTPS. The Certbot is a free and open-source program, which allows you to secure connections to your web server.

To install a Lets Encrypt Free SSL Certificate on your web server, launch your terminal/command line and update your operating system repositories.

NOTE - Let's Encrypt Certbot requires a fully qualified domain name to be pointed to your web server address. Ensure that the DNS for your domain name is pointed to the server IP address on your domain host provider of choice.

How to manage a domain’s DNS records

Step 1 - Updating the repositories

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Next, we need to configure the domain name in the Apache default configuration file. This is a configuration file for the default virtual host in the Apache web server. In Apache, virtual hosts allow you to host multiple websites on a single server, and the default virtual host is used when no other virtual hosts match the incoming request.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

Un comment 'ServerName' and enter your domain name.

Add 'ServerAlias' one line below and add your domain name with the 'www' prefix.

Save and exit the file. You can now restart Apache

sudo service apache2 reload

Check if the Apache web server is running

sudo systemctl status apache2.service

Install Certbot

Step 1 Install Certbot using PIP

This command installs Python 3, the "venv" module for creating Python virtual environments

sudo apt install python3 python3-venv libaugeas0

Step 2 Set up a virtual environment

We now create a Python virtual environment named "certbot" in the /opt/certbot/ directory using the "venv" module.

sudo python3 -m venv /opt/certbot/

sudo /opt/certbot/bin/pip install --upgrade pip

Step 3 Install Certbot

sudo /opt/certbot/bin/pip install certbot certbot-apache

Create a symlink for Certbot to run

sudo ln -s /opt/certbot/bin/certbot /usr/bin/certbot

NOTE - If your web server is locked down to your private network, remember to temporarily open up HTTP and HTTPS access for all IP addresses to allow Let's Encrypt to access the server to complete the installation

How to add a rule to a Cloud Security Group

Create the Certificate

sudo certbot --apache

or manually specify the domain names you require SSL certificates for

Create SSL certs for a specified domain

sudo certbot --apache -d example.com -d www.example.com

Congratulations! You have installed your Free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate and secured connections to your web server.

visit the following links for more information about Let's Encrypt and the Certbot

Let's Encrypt

CertBot