Enabling HTTPS Using Let's Encrypt

Let's Encrypt is a certificate authority that gives out digital certificates to the community free of charge.

Using thir "shell access" method, one can install a program called certbot that gives quick start instructions for installing and running certbot to issue a certificate for your host and system.

Detailed below is what I did for some of my servers (HAProxy on Ubuntu and Apache on Ubuntu).

HAProxy on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install certbot 

certbot certonly --webroot -w /var/www -d meowcad.com -d www.meowcad.com

I had to create a meow.pem for my version of HAProxy to work:

cd /etc/letsencrypt/live/meowcad.com
cat private.pem fullchain.pem > meow.pem

Apache on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-certbot-apache 

certbot certonly -n --agree-tos --email $EMAIL --domain mechaelephant.com --domain www.mechaelephant.com --webroot --webroot-path /var/www/  --expand

Notes

• Make sure to add the extra domain so that both www.domain.com and domain.com work.
• If you've already issued a certificate and want to add a domain like I needed to for www.mechalephant.com, adding the domain mechaelephant.com because I forgot the non www prefixed web page, then I think the --expand flag will work to add an additional domain.
• I'm still not sure how to renew or automatically renew the certs...

2017-06-12