To be able to host websites with https capabilities, it is strongly recommended to use a certificate signed by a valid authority. Most companies charge somewhere between 4 and 400 Dollar/Euro for a signed SSL/TLS certificate. Then there are some free certificate authorities like StartSSL… But for not to long there now is a new player to the SSL game: Letsencrypt!
The upsides of letsencrypt are mainly that its 100% free and the biggest advantage it supports automated certificate signing!
Below a short but sweet tutorial to configure letsencrypt for certificate signing on a server with virtualmin GPL control panel.
If you are looking for a tutorial on how to setup your own webhosting server using virtualmin please see this tutorial
- Make a backup you fool!
- Update your server
– You can choose to do so by using virtualmin update manager or executesudo yum update -y
on Centos orsudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
on debian/ubuntu systems - Install git
– On Ubuntu:sudo apt-get install git
– On Centos:sudo yum install git
- Clone letsencrypt
git clone https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt
(REMEMBER WHERE YOU CLONED IT you will need that later) - First time run to set email address
– Execute ./letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto -m [email protected]
– After executing the script as described above, you will be asked to select domains for which you want to generate a certificate PLEASE DESELECT ALL DOMAINS (if generated trough command line it might mess up your apache config)
– It does not matter if the script fails or stops responding, you can exit the script using CTRL+C - Login to webmin and navigate to Webmin>Webmin Configuration and click on the SSL Encryption button
– Select the Let`s Encrpt tab and click the module configuration button
– Fill in the path for the letsencrypt auto command, in our case/root/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto
and click save configuration - Navigate to virtualmin and navigate to the domain for which you would like to issue the certificate
– Click on edit virtual server
– On the enabled features section make sure “enable SSL website
” is selected and click on save virtual server. - Click on: server configuration> manage ssl certificates and select the letsencrypt tab
– Click “request certificate
”
– PROFIT!
.