So many people are looking for FREE SSL for their website. Today we are going to explore How to install FREE SSL Certificate using CertBot on Ubuntu Apache server.
Before start article we need some prerequisite for this article.
- SSH with sudo root user and installed Apache on VPS ( How to install Linux Apache, MySQL with PHPMYADMIN, PHP (LAMP) on Ubuntu ) .
- Domain name A record with WWW and without WWW point to the VPS public IP. (How to point Domain name to VPS ).
- Virtual Host created on VPS. ( How to Setup Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu )
This tutorial will use /etc/apache2/sites-available/example1.com.confas an example and domain name example1.com
step 1: Install CertBot / Add a CertBot PPA
You need to add CertBot PPA to your list of repositories.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install software-properties-common sudo add-apt-repository universe sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot sudo apt-get update
step 2: Get and Install certificates.
sudo apt-get install certbot python3-certbot-apache sudo certbot --apache
Run this command to get a certificate and have Certbot edit your Apache configuration automatically to serve it, turning on HTTPS access in a single step.
sudo certbot --apache -d example1.com -d www.example1.com
This runs certbot with the –apache plugin, using -d to specify the names you’d like the certificate to be valid for. If you are using first time CertBot in server then its promt for an email address. After that CertBot ask for some HTTPS configuration. Which output is similar to this.
After choosing the option you will get confirmation SSL installed on your server.
Step 3: Verify CertBot Auto-Renewal
Let’s Encrpt’s certificates are only valid for 90 days. But don’t worried set cron tab script to /etc/cron.d this script run twice a day to renew automatically renew any certificate. If you want to test renewal process. Let’s do dry run test with CertBot.
sudo certbot renew --dry-run
If there is no any error. You installed the Let’s Encrypt client certbot, downloaded SSL certificates for your domain, configured Apache to use these certificates, and set up automatic certificate renewal. You can find full documents from here.
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