HTTPS is a secure protocol for the internet. Unlike the communication in HTTP, which happens in plain-text, the data transferred between the server and the client with HTTPS is encrypted. HTTPS also verifies the identity of the website we are accessing with a SSL/TLS certificate. It was initially used in online payment website, but in the recent age of privacy, it is deemed mandatory. That’s where Let’s Encrypt comes in.

Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority , they verify a website and issues certificates. The browsers have a list of trusted Certificate Authorities whose certificates it will accept. There are a lot of Certificate Authorities, so what make Let’s Encrypt different?

Two main issues with SSL certificates was that, it was paid and the process is not generally automated. Let’s Encrypt solves both these issues. Let’s Encrypt issues certificates free of cost and it can be automated. You just need root terminal access to the server. It is currently in public beta and is backed by major players like Mozilla, Facebook, Google, etc.

In this article, we will see how to create a certificate with Let’s Encrypt and use it to host our server via HTTPS. We will be using an nginx server here but the process is similar to all servers.

Installing Let’s Encrypt

Use SSH to log into your server as root user. If you have git installed in the server, you can clone the Let’s Encrypt repo in /opt folder.

cd /opt git clone https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt

Otherwise, download the latest tar.gz package from https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/releases with wget. Extract this to /opt/ and rename the folder to letsencrypt . Latest version at the time of writing was v0.2.0 , so the commands for this are.

wget https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/archive/v0.2.0.tar.gz tar xf v0.2.0.tar.gz -C /opt/ cd /opt mv letsencrypt-0.2.0 letsencrypt

Now we have letsencrypt installed at /opt/letsencrypt . You can add this to PATH .

Let’s Encrypt Configuration

Before you add SSL certificates, you need to register a domain and the domain must point to the server’s public address. For this, you need to a set up a A or CNAME record with your DNS. You can check with your domain registar or custom DNS service to do this. If you have a HTTP site running in the server, you would have already done this.

Let’s Encrypt need to verify that you own the domain before they provide you with the certificates. This can be done in various ways. If you are running Apache server, Let’s Encrypt can use it to verify your ownership and even install the certificates in the server for you. There is also something similar for nginx , but it’s still experimental and not production-ready.

Another method is standalone , where the Let’s Encrypt client will create a temporary webserver for verification. However, this need our nginx server to be shutdown while creating and renewing our certificates. That’s just not viable.

So we will go with the webroot method. In this method, we provide a folder path as webroot-path . This folder must be served by our server. A temporary file will be made inside <webroot-path>/.well-known/acme-challenge/ by the client. Let’s Encrypt will access it from the domain to verify the ownership.

For example, if the domain in www.example.com and the webroot-path is /usr/share/nginx/html . The client will create a temporary file named something like 1PnCIkY inside /usr/share/nginx/html/.well-known/acme-challenge/ and it will accessed from www.example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/1PnCIkY for verification of the domain ownership.

The configuration needed to create the certificates are put in a file named cli.ini inside /opt/letsencrypt .

rsa - key - size = 4096 email = < your - email > domains = < domains > authenticator = webroot webroot - path = / usr / share / nginx / html

You need to provide your email address for recovering the certificate credentials. Also add the domains for which you want the certificates for seperated by commas like, example.com, www.example.com .

Nginx

We need to set up nginx to serve the webroot-path folder with nginx. If you have not installed nginx yet, install it with,

apt-get install nginx

Now, open the nginx configuration at /etc/nginx/sites-available/default and change it as following to serve .well-known folder.

server { listen 80 ; server_name <domain-name> ; root /usr/share/nginx/html ; index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html ; location ^~ /.well-known/ { allow all ; } }

Create Certificate

Finally, we are ready to create our first certificate. Execute the following commands.

cd /opt/letsencrypt ./letsencrypt-auto certonly --agree-tos --config cli.ini

The certonly parameter creates the certificate. --agree-tos flag is used say that we are accepting the terms. --config flag is used to point to the configuration file, which is found in /opt/letsencrypt/cli.ini .

This creates the SSL certificates in /etc/letsencrypt/live/<domain-name>/ folder. Whenever we renew the certificates, the latest will be found in this folder.

Nginx HTTPS configuration

Now that we have the certificates, we can change the configuration in nginx to serve via HTTPS. The HTTPS connection is done via the port 443 . The first server block in nginx configuration at /etc/nginx/sites-available/default is to redirect the HTTP traffic to HTTPS. We are also returning a 301 Moved Permanently header back. Replace the domain-name here to your domain.

server { listen 80 ; server_name <domain-name> ; return 301 https:// $host$request_uri ; }

The second server block is for HTTPS running at port 443. It uses the certificates found at /etc/letsencrypt/live/<domain-name>

server { listen 443 ssl ; server_name <domain-name> ; ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/<domain-name>/fullchain.pem ; ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/<domain-name>/privkey.pem ; root /usr/share/nginx/html ; index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html ; location / { try_files $uri $uri / = 404 ; } location ^~ /.well-known/ { allow all ; } }

You can reload the nginx with,

service nginx reload

If your are using reverse-proxy to host in some other port, the configuration will look like this.

server { listen 4125 ; server_name <domain-name> ; error_page 497 https:// $host : 4125 $request_uri ; ssl on ; ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/<domain-name>/fullchain.pem ; ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/<domain-name>/privkey.pem ; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:4125/ ; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr ; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for ; proxy_set_header X_FORWARDED_PROTO https ; proxy_set_header Host $http_host ; proxy_buffering off ; proxy_redirect off ; } }

Here, the error_page 497 is used to redirect the HTTP traffic to port 4125 to HTTPS.

Automated Renewal

Let’s Encrypt certificates are only valid for 90 days, so you would have to renew them. To renew, you just have to run the client with --renew-by-default flag also. The command would look like this.

/opt/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto certonly --renew-by-default --agree-tos --config /opt/letsencrypt/cli.ini

This command will renew the certificate. We can automate renewal by running this command as a cron job. Cron is a time-based job scheduler. We can make this command run once a month to renew certificates at a monthly basis to prevent it from being expired. We also need to reload the nginx configurations.

To add a new cron job, type the following command.

sudo crontab -e

Add the following lines to the end of the cron file.

SHELL = /bin/bash HOME = / MAILTO = ”[email protected]” 30 4 1 * * ( /opt/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto certonly --renew-by-default --agree-tos --config /opt/letsencrypt/cli.ini && service nginx reload ) >> /var/log/letsencrypt.log

This causes the command to run every month on the 1st at 4:30AM. The output of this command is stored in /var/log/letsencrypt.log .