Add SSL to Your Site with Let’s Encrypt
Add SSL to Your Site with Let’s Encrypt
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the technology behind establishing an encrypted connection between a web server (host) and a web browser (client). This connection ensures all the data transferred between the host and client remains private. SSL has been adopted by many websites, and all the big companies you visit daily facebook, twitter, google, duckduckgo are SSL encrypted. SSL can be identified by the https:// you see in the address bar while visiting the website. Adding a SSL security initially had a yearly price, but thanks to https://letsencrypt.org/ we now have a free SSL service. Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and openCertificate Authority. They are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and are running a crowdfunding campaign to support our operations, so if you want to support them you can contribute to them here.
If you have a Cpanel and your host supports the let’s encrypt encryption, you can easily open a ticket asking them to activate the SSL certificate. To see the list of supported hosts click here. If you do not have a Cpanel and are running a VPS, I recommend you ‘certbot’. You can install certbot via it’s installation page or follow the following commands.
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$ wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto $ chmod a+x ./certbot-auto |
Now once you have installed the certbot in your VPS you can run the command below to check out all the options (make sure you are in the certbot directory first.
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./certbot-auto --help all |
To encrypt a website you can run the following
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./certbot-auto --apache -d example.com -d www.example.com //Where -d specifies the domains and you can add more subdomains such as -d other.example.com |
After the steps you will be prompted with some steps with instructions, just follow it to add SSL certificate to your website.
Happy SSLsing