SSL Encryption

SSL encryption is an important component of any website and it can be intimidating to setup on your webserver. I recently switched over several sites to SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt, which is an opensource, free and automated solution for SSL.

More specifically I used an piece of software called certbot to install the certs for my sites. They have a great site that walks you through the entire process. Because of their great site, I will only give you a brief overview of the process here.

First, visit their site and use the dropdown menus to find your specific application. In my case I am running Apache on Ubuntu 16.04. You should be redirected to a new page that outlines the steps you should follow. This is the page I used I entered the following commands to install certbot and my SSL certificates. Super easy.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-certbot-apache
sudo certbot --apache