Coding for Entrepreneurs

Hello Linux: Custom Domain & Https with Let's Encrypt

By Justin

Hello Linux: Custom Domain & Https with Let's Encrypt
This is the sixth post of a many part series. This post is the starter post for the whole series.
Let's Encrypt is one of the best things to happen to the internet in a long time. It is a provider of security certificates so we can have https for free. Yup free. These certificates still_ can cost anywhere from $150 to $2k+ USD per year.
Since Let's Encrypt Exists, there is no reason to not have https on our site.
Requirements
Be sure to complete
Our Live Server
  • Ubuntu 18.04

1. SSH into your server

ssh [email protected]
Replace [email protected] with your user / ip

2. Point Your Custom Domain to Your Server's IP Address

localip=$(hostname  -I | cut -f1 -d' ')
echo $localip
Grab this value for the setting up your domain. Mine was 104.248.231.241.
Set an A Record on your domain registrar for each subdomain you want to point to your server.
Here's an example step-by-step on name.com
  1. Login on name.com
  2. Go to my domains
  3. Click your domain such as https://www.name.com/account/domain/details/codingforawesome.com
  4. Click on DNS Records
  5. Use the following settings:
Subdomain = www (aka host)
Type: A
Host: www
Answer: 104.248.231.241 (replace with your value)
TTL: 300 (or whatever default)
Click Add Record
Empty Host
Type: A
Host: 
Answer: 104.248.231.241 (replace with your value)
TTL: 300 (or whatever default)

3. Install certbot by Let's Encrypt

Back in your ssh session, let's run:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot

sudo apt-get update -y

sudo apt-get install python-certbot-nginx -y

4. Update Nginx Settings to New Domain

From this post we created the following:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/myproject.conf
Let's edit that file:
nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/myproject.conf
We'll just change server_name from your ip_address to your custom domain (including the hosts).
Let's say you added www.codingforawesome.com, codingforawesome.com, and blog.codingforawesome.com, then your conf file would look like:
server {
    server_name codingforawesome.com www.codingforawesome.com blog.codingforawesome.com;
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;

    location / {
        include proxy_params;
        proxy_pass http://unix:/var/www/myproject/src/myproject.sock;
        proxy_buffer_size       128k;
        proxy_buffers           4 256k;
        proxy_read_timeout      60s;
        proxy_busy_buffers_size 256k;
        client_max_body_size    2M;
    }
}
Save and close.
Let's verify that the file in sites-enabled has the same data.
nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/myproject.conf
It should be the same.

5. Run Let's Encrypt

It's important that you use your domain here and very important that your domain is already pointing to your server.
The root call is sudo certbot --nginx and just append -d <your-domain> for every domain and subdomain you want to include in this certificate.
sudo certbot --nginx -d codingforawesome.com -d www.codingforawesome.com -d blog.codingforawesome.com
This command will ask you if you want to redirect http to https, I think you should redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS.
If you did this successfully, your nginx configuration file will change to work with https. Since we have our ufw firewall settings to Nginx Full we should have no problems accessing https going forward.
Finally, verify auto renew is on:
sudo certbot renew --dry-run

6. And we're live.

For many Django projects, that's all we need to do. We have almost everything we need to ensure we can run a production server with a production database along with push through git.
Pretty cool huh?
If you're using digital ocean. This entire process can start as low as $5 month. I think that's pretty awesome.

Wrap Up

We now have
Still coming, but optional
  • Task Queues with Celery & Redis
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Hello Linux: Custom Domain & Https with Let's Encrypt