Let’s Encrypt is a non-profit certificate authority run by Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) that provides X.509 certificates for Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption at no charge.
The certificate is valid for 90 days, during which renewal can take place at any time. The offer is accompanied by an automated process designed to overcome manual creation, validation, signing, installation, and renewal of certificates for secure websites. It launched on April 12, 2016.
In this article, we will show you how you can install Let’s Encrypt Certificate for Nginx web server and configure the certificate to renew automatically on CentOS 8.
Installing Nginx
Nginx is available in the default CentOS repositories.
# dnf install nginx
Enable and start the Nginx service.
# systemctl enable nginx
# systemctl start nginx
Creating Virtual Host
By default, Nginx is configured to load all configuration files that ends with .conf from the/etc/nginx/conf.d/ directory.
# nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/example.com.conf
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}
server {
listen 443 ssl http2;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
root /home/example.com;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
access_log /var/log/nginx/example.com.access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/example.com.error.log;
location ~ \.(php|phar)(/.*)?$ {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.(?:php|phar))(/.*)$;
fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
fastcgi_pass php-fpm;
}
Install Certbot
Certbot is a free command-line tool that simplifies the process for obtaining and renewing Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates from and auto-enabling HTTPS on your server.
# wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto
# mv certbot-auto /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto
# chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto
Install Lets Encrypt Certificate
# /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto --nginx
Creating virtual environment...
Installing Python packages...
Installation succeeded.
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator nginx, Installer nginx
Enter email address (used for urgent renewal and security notices) (Enter 'c' to
cancel): [email protected]
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Please read the Terms of Service at
https://letsencrypt.org/documents/LE-SA-v1.2-November-15-2017.pdf. You must agree in order to register with the ACME server at https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory
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(A)gree/(C)ancel: a
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Would you be willing to share your email address with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a founding partner of the Let's Encrypt project and the non-profit
organization that develops Certbot? We'd like to send you email about our work
encrypting the web, EFF news, campaigns, and ways to support digital freedom.
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(Y)es/(N)o: y
Which names would you like to activate HTTPS for?
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1: example.com
2: www.example.com
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Select the appropriate numbers separated by commas and/or spaces, or leave input
blank to select all options shown (Enter 'c' to cancel):
Obtaining a new certificate
Performing the following challenges:
http-01 challenge for example.com
http-01 challenge for www.example.com
Waiting for verification...
Cleaning up challenges
Deploying Certificate to VirtualHost /etc/nginx/conf.d/example.com.conf
Deploying Certificate to VirtualHost /etc/nginx/conf.d/example.com.conf
Please choose whether or not to redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS, removing HTTP access.
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1: No redirect - Make no further changes to the webserver configuration.
2: Redirect - Make all requests redirect to secure HTTPS access. Choose this for
new sites, or if you're confident your site works on HTTPS. You can undo this
change by editing your web server's configuration.
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Select the appropriate number [1-2] then [enter] (press 'c' to cancel): 1
Future versions of Certbot will automatically configure the webserver so that all requests redirect to secure HTTPS access. You can control this behavior and disable this warning with the --redirect and --no-redirect flags.
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Congratulations! You have successfully enabled https://example.com and
https://www.example.com
You should test your configuration at:
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=example.com
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.example.com
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IMPORTANT NOTES:
- Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem
Your key file has been saved at:
/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem
Your cert will expire on 2020-05-27. To obtain a new or tweaked
version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot-auto
again with the "certonly" option. To non-interactively renew *all*
of your certificates, run "certbot-auto renew"
- Your account credentials have been saved in your Certbot
configuration directory at /etc/letsencrypt. You should make a
secure backup of this folder now. This configuration directory will
also contain certificates and private keys obtained by Certbot so
making regular backups of this folder is ideal.
- If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by:
Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/donate
Donating to EFF: https://eff.org/donate-le
- We were unable to subscribe you the EFF mailing list because your
e-mail address appears to be invalid. You can try again later by
visiting https://act.eff.org.
Test Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate
Test your SSL certificate for problems and its security ratings by going to the below URL.
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest
https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html
Renew Let’s Encrypt Certificate
Let’s Encrypt certificate is valid for 90 days from the date of issuance, and it needs to be renewed before it expires.
Run the following command to create a new cronjob which will renew the certificate and restart Nginx.
# echo "0 0,12 * * * root python3 -c 'import random; import time; time.sleep(random.random() * 3600)' && /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto -q renew --renew-hook \"systemctl reload nginx\"" | sudo tee -a /etc/crontab > /dev/null
You can also simulate the certificate renewal process with the below command to ensure the renewal goes smooth.
# /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto renew --dry-run
In this guide, we demonstrated how you can use certbot to install and configure the Let’s Encrypt certificate on Nginx webserver running on a CentOS 8 system.