Let’s Encrypt with Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04 Server

Let’s Encrypt is a free and open certificate authority which provides free SSL certificate services to everyone. Their SSL certificates are suitable for web service and email service.

Certbot is a tool developed by EFF, it enable HTTPS on your website automatically and deploy Let’s Encrypt certificates.

Installation of Certbot

Installation procedure is simple! You can install it with apt-get or wget. For apt-get method,

$ sudo apt-get install letsencrypt

Alternatively you can install through wget method and make the downloaded file executable.

$ wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto

$ chmod a+x certbot-auto

Creation & Renewal of Certificates

To create let’s encrypt certificate for a website, for an example, linuxharbour.com and use

$ ./certbot-auto -d linuxharbour.com –nginx

For above command example, it will ise the Nginx plugin for authentication & installation. And you can supply multiple hostnames with option -d in one line to create multiple certificates.

$ ./certbot-auto renew

To renew certificate, you can use certbot subcommand ‘renew’ to do renewal process. Easy!

References

Let’s Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/

Certbot: https://certbot.eff.org/