Setup Let's Encrypt with Nginx

Posted on  November 19, 2019

Reading time  is 5 minute(s)

When I migrated my VPS (with Ubuntu) to an other host, I needed to setup Nginx again with Let's Encrypt but I always forget how to exactly do it. This blog post is aimed to describe in easy steps how to setup up Nginx with auto-renewing Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates.

Setting up Nginx

Setting up Nginx is super easy on Ubuntu. Run the following commands on your VPS.

1sudo apt update sudo apt install nginx

If you have a firewall (ufw) enabled run the following command to enable HTTP (80) and HTTPS (443) to the firewall.

1sudo ufw allow 'Nginx Full'

Installing Certbot

Certbot is also super easy. Run the following commands on your VPS.

1sudo apt-get update
2sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
3 
4sudo add-apt-repository universe
5sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
6 
7sudo apt-get update
8sudo apt-get install certbot python-certbot-nginx

Getting a SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt

Now that we installed Certbot we can get a certificate from Let’s Encrypt by running the following command.

1sudo certbot --nginx -d example.com -d www.example.com

Auto-renew your certificates

To auto-renew the certificates you have installed, add the following command to your crontab (open by running crontab -e from terminal)

10 \* \* \* \* sudo certbot renew