Setting up SSL Certificates

This assumes that you have a LAMP stack (or equivalent) setup. The instructions are specific to Apache and CentOS. See https://certbot.eff.org/ for more instructions.

This step also requires that you have a domain name, and have associated the domain name with the IP hosting your webserver.

While it is possible to use only the IP, it is not recommended. Certbot won't let you use an IP. For some more intro reading, give these a look-see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2043617/is-it-possible-to-have-ssl-certificate-for-ip-address-not-domain-name https://timnash.co.uk/guessing-ssl-questions/

1. Download and Install the Certbot wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto chmod a+x certbot-auto

2. Run the Certbot ./path/to/certbot-auto --apache

This part will ask for the domain name you would like to certify.

You now have a certicate. However, certificates expire and you will have to periodically renew your certificate

3. Renew certificate ./path/to/certbot-auto renew

Certificate renewals do not require the need to enter the domain name

A cron job can be set up so that certificates are renewed automatically. It is recommended by Certbot documentation to renew twice a day.

Here's a nice little guide for cron: https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Deployment_Guide-en-US/ch-autotasks.html

TODO: A nice extension of the guide would be something that can renew multiple domains at once, or creating a single server to manage all SSL certs (if possible)