Clement Nedelcu's Development Journal

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past year, you should know by now that you can get SSL certificates free of charge from LetsEncrypt , without registration, and with automatic renewal! This is one of the best thing that's happened to web admins and the web in general in the recent years. The certificates are authentic and work great in all browsers (you get the little green lock icon like everywhere else). Let's get straight to the point. The three steps are summarized here: 1) Download LetsEncrypt (the application) for your Linux server 2) Run the application to generate a certificate for your domain and set up the monthly auto-renew cron job 3) Add the certificate to your Nginx configuration. Step 1: download LetsEncrypt Install git if you haven't done so yet: # apt-get install git Use git to get the application and store it somewhere (ie: /root/temp) # git clone https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt /root/temp/letsencrypt ...

This article will explain how to serve content securely over HTTPS via Nginx . This can be done in 3 simple steps detailed below. It's unbelievably easy! I've even added an optional step for optimization, and links for further readings. The three steps are as follows: Step 1: preparing your private key and CSR  Step 2: obtaining an SSL certificate Step 3: Nginx SSL configuration This post is valid as of October 2014, tested with Nginx 1.2, Nginx 1.4 and Nginx 1.6 (probably works with every version above 1.2). For older versions, directive names might change just a tiny bit but the rest of the process should otherwise work normally. Requirements You will need to have OpenSSL installed on your server. To find out whether OpenSSL is installed on your server, type " openssl version ". It should tell you the version you are running. I recommend version 1.0.1 at least because it supports several features which will come in handy in future tutorials (inc...