Let’s Encrypt

In a era when paradigms of privacy and security are dictating the government rules and business ideas, serving web content over a secure connection is becoming important. Search engines rank your web content higher if your website is HTTPS enabled. There was a proposal to make all connections secure by default in HTTP/2 protocol. Though it did not make it into the final draft, [Many implementations only support secure HTTP/2 and no major browser supports HTTP/2 over unencrypted channels] you can understand the importance given to having a secure connection.

It has also become cheap (free) to convert an HTTP website into an HTTPS website. Let’s encrypt is one such effort in helping you get a TLS certificate for your website. And they recommend using certbot to get an HTTPS certificate. Lets-Encrypt is a certificate authority. And Certbot is a software utility which helps you create a certificate and patch your web-server to use it. Instructions are pretty clear on the certbot website and how to run their command an application. You can choose between a host of combinations of web servers and operating systems.

For example, if you have an Nginx web-server which is running on Debian 10, visit this web-page and follow the 4 step instructions.

1. Make sure that you have Certbot and python-certbot-nginx
2. Run certbot --nginx as the root, which will obtain a certificate and also patch the Nginx configuration file Or optionally just run certbot certonly --nginx to just obtain a certificate without patching the Nginx configuration file
3. Test automatic renewal with the certbot renew --dry-run command and verify if a cron job is added for the same
4. Visit your website (and verify). And never see an Insecure Connection warning again!