How to install your own Ubuntu 20.04 Linux server | Part 6 of 10

In Part 6 of the tutorial we'll install SSL certificates and force the web server to serve SSL only.

It's recommended that you have read the previous steps of this course. You'll find the overview at the end of this blogpost.

Course ingredients:

• Apple MacBook Pro
• Apache Web Server
• Hetzner Cloud Virtual Server

12. Get free Let's Encrypt SSL certificates

Instead of buying a certificate at one of the many sources on the internet we'll create free certificates at Let's Encrypt. That's one of the advantages if you have your own remote server up and running. The freedom to choose whatever you would like to install.

Let's Encrypt recommends that most people with shell access use the Certbot ACME (Automatic Certificate Management Environment) client.

Certbot is a free, open source software tool for automatically using Let’s Encrypt certificates on manually-administrated websites to enable HTTPS.

Install Certbot

Open a second session in a new terminal.

Switch to root user and navigate to /etc/apache2 directory.

su

cd /etc/apache2
apt update && apt install certbot python3-certbot-apache

Confirm with yes

13. Request certificate, active https and force SSL

Request a certificate for domain

certbot -d <DomainName>

For Apache

To use certbot for both a http://domain and http://www.domain use the following command:

certbot --apache -n -d domain.com -d www.domain.com --agree-tos --email admin@domain.com --redirect --expand

Without specifying both domains, you will get a certificate error for the domain not specified during creation.

Renew certificate

First check status of certificates:

systemctl status certbot.timer

Renew certificates:

certbot renew --dry-run

The Course Syllable:

22.05.2021 – Part 1

1. Introduction & reasoning

29.05.2021 – Part 2

2. Create Hetzner Cloud Server
3. Connect to Server

05.06.2021 – Part 3

4. Update and upgrade Ubuntu installation and install apache2
5. Install PHP

12.06.2021 – Part 4

6. Establish ssh keys
7. Add new sudo user
8. Deactivate root user
9. Make new sudo user owner of ssh service

19.06.2021 – Part 5

10. Buy Domain and point it to Hetzner Server
11. Create Virtual Host for domain

26.06.2021 – Part 6

12. Get free Let's Encrypt SSL certificates
13. Request certificate, active https and force SSL

03.07.2021 – Part 7

14. Install Git on Remote Server
15. Create CI/CD user and ssh keys for Gitlab on Remote Server

10.07.2021 – Part 8

16. Create Gitlab Repository
17. Establish ssh keys and configure CI/CD

17.07.2021 – Part 9

18. Install MySQL
19. Install phpMyAdmin

24.07.2021 – Part 10

20. Summary of project development workflow
21. I'll be back – The course update log

See you next week for more

Johnnie