Centos 7 Nginx Letsencrypt Https And Https
Overview
Many web servers require secure communications through the HTTPS protocol, and the most common way to do this is with the help of a TLS certificate. TLS (Transport Layer Security) is an internet protocol used to provide secure communications over the web. Let’s Encrypt is a free, open-source Certificate Authority that provides free digital certificates to organisations and individuals alike. It’s the perfect choice for setting up an HTTPS server on a Centos 7 machine using Nginx.
Prerequisites
To follow along with this guide, you’ll need the following:
- A Centos 7 machine with Nginx installed.
- Access to the root user account.
- An active domain name.
- The ability to edit Nginx configuration files.
Once you have all of these pieces in place, you’ll be ready to set up your secure HTTPS server.
Installing Certbot
Certbot is the official client for the Let’s Encrypt Certificate Authority. We need it to automatically generate and renew TLS certificates for us. To install it, we first need to add the Let’s Encrypt repository to our system’s package list. This can be done by running the following command:
sudo yum-config-manager –add-repo https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/
Next, we’ll install the EPEL package:
sudo yum install epel-release
Now we can finally install Certbot:
sudo yum install certbot
Generating A Certificate
Now that Certbot is installed, we can generate our certificate. To do this, we need to run the following command:
sudo certbot certonly --webroot -w /var/www/example.com -d example.com -d www.example.com
In the command above, we are telling certbot to generate a certificate for our domain example.com and its subdomain www.example.com. We also need to provide Certbot with a web root directory, which should be set to the directory where the site is hosted. For example, here we are setting it to /var/www/example.com.
Once you have run the command, Certbot will generate the certificate and save it in /etc/letsencrypt/live. It will also create a cron job that will renew the certificate automatically every 90 days. You can view the cron job by running the following command:
sudo crontab -e
Configuring Nginx
Now that we have the certificate, we need to configure Nginx to use it. To do this, we need to edit our Nginx configuration file. We can open it with the following command:
sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
In the configuration file, we need to add the following:
server {
listen 443 ssl;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
root /var/www/example.com;
location / {
index index.html;
}
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
}
When you’re done, save the file and exit. Finally, we need to restart Nginx for the changes to take effect. We can do that with the following command:
sudo systemctl restart nginx
Testing The Configuration
Now that we have configured our Nginx server to use Let’s Encrypt certificates, we need to test it to make sure it’s working correctly. To do this, we can use the following command:
curl -I -L https://example.com
This command will show us the response from the server, including the protocol, the status code, and the TLS certificate being used. It should look something like this:
HTTP/2 200
Connection: keep-alive
Last-Modified: Wed, 13 Feb 2019 13:59:17 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 280
Server: nginx
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=63072000; includeSubDomains
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2019 14:14:14 GMT
Content-Security-Policy: upgrade-insecure-requests
TLSv1.2
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
Conclusion
In this guide, we have shown you how to set up a secure HTTPS server on a Centos 7 machine with Nginx and Let’s Encrypt. We have installed Certbot, generated the certificate, and configured Nginx to use it. We have also tested it to make sure everything is working properly. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment below.
Thank You for Reading This Article
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FAQs
Q: What is Let’s Encrypt?
A: Let’s Encrypt is a free, open-source Certificate Authority that provides free digital certificates to organisations and individuals alike.
Q: How can I set up an HTTPS server on Centos 7?
A: To set up an HTTPS server on Centos 7, you will need to install Certbot, generate the certificate, configure Nginx to use it, and test it to make sure everything is working properly.
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