8 ms·

Using Free SSL/TLS Certificates from Let’s Encrypt for Nginx

164 points by cujanovic 11y ago

uhoreg 11y ago
I wrote up my own HOWTO for nginx just the other day.https://www.uhoreg.ca/blog/20160218-1757 https://www.uhoreg.ca/blog/20160218-1757 I used the acme-tiny client instead of the official client. My post is mostly aimed at Debian-based distributions, but should be easily adaptable to others.
IgorPartola 11y ago
I was hoping this was an nginx module where you could specify something like `ssl_letsencrypt on;` and be done with it.
- teekert 11y ago
  Me too. I'm disappointed, this would be THE killer feature. Hope they are working on it (they should imho.)
- joshmanders 11y ago
  Caddy has this feature and it's amazing. https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https
  - Cyph0n 11y ago
    Wow. I might check try it out then.
    - xena 11y ago
      It really does do what it says it does. https://github.com/Xe/dotfiles/tree/master/ansible/roles/caddy/files/sites https://github.com/Xe/dotfiles/tree/master/ansible/roles/cad... https://xena.greedo.xeserv.us https://xena.greedo.xeserv.us
    - grey-area 11y ago
      I would definitely recommend it, I've replaced a few instances of nginx with it with no problems. It is based on the really solid net/http code from golang std lib and adds a few nice things like automatic tls/certs.
  - pilif 11y ago
    this is how it should work. Very nice. I can't wait for other web servers to gain this ability too. Or at least allow us to load certificates from dynamic locations based on some request data. All other web servers I looked at (nginx, apache, lighttpd) still require at least a reload for an updated certificate and a configuration file change for a new certificate to be used. I wonder how caddy works with the very low 5 certificates per public suffix and week limit. Does it automatically bundle domains and request a single certificate with SANs?
    - joshmanders 11y ago
      > this is how it should work. Very nice. Yeah, Caddy is amazing. Matt is doing an awesome job with it. > I wonder how caddy works with the very low 5 certificates per public suffix and week limit. Does it automatically bundle domains and request a single certificate with SANs? I directed Matt to this discussion so I hope can answer these questions for you. I unfortunately cannot.
    - mholt 11y ago
      > this is how it should work. Very nice. Thanks for your comments; glad you like the way we integrated it! > Does it automatically bundle domains and request a single certificate with SANs? No, as it turns out, SAN makes the auto-management code highly complicated, since names could overlap in different certs, etc. It also complicates renewals and gives more room for error (e.g. 49 of the domains verify but 1 fails, so the cert can't be renewed). So I've opted not to support SAN certificates for the automatic HTTPS feature. But you can of course still issue your own SAN certificates and use those. Right now, Caddy reloads itself when it renews certificates, but as of Caddy 0.8.2 (slated for release any day now), Caddy will do it all in-process, no reloading.
    - jimjag 11y ago
      From what I can see, Caddy also does a reload. With Apache, you can do a Graceful restart and not lose any traffic, plus, using mod_lua you could create a relatively easy way to add this automagically.
      - 11y ago
  - greggman 11y ago
    Know of an automated caddy docker reverse proxy container? Here's an nginx one. Took about < 5 mins to add to my docker-compose file and start proxying my existing site https://hub.docker.com/r/dmp1ce/nginx-proxy-letsencrypt/ https://hub.docker.com/r/dmp1ce/nginx-proxy-letsencrypt/ Would love to see a caddy version of same --- hmm, I guess the current caddy docker images can do this though though they need a little more configuration
    - joshmanders 11y ago
      There's ongoing discussion about this here: https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/199 https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/199 One of my tasks this week is to get this in motion.
- nickblah 11y ago
  If you're open to using OpenResty (basically nginx with some additional plugins and Lua integration), I've coincidentally been working on a plugin to make all of this completely automatic with Let's Encrypt (taking advantage of the relatively new ssl_certificate_by_lua functionality OpenResty provides): https://github.com/GUI/lua-resty-auto-ssl https://github.com/GUI/lua-resty-auto-ssl We just rolled it out to our first production site last week, but any feedback would be welcome.
- dheera 11y ago
  Or better yet, make "ssl_letsencrypt on;" the default. Make it so that newbies can just apt-get install nginx/apache/lighttpd/etc. and have https up and running, no questions asked. The real reason https adoption isn't up to par has less to do with people not willing to spend money, and more because it's not up by default. Now that https is free, please make it enabled by default.
  - mholt 11y ago
    Check out Caddy, which enables HTTPS by default: https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https
  - majewsky 11y ago
    That was something that I complained about even before letsencrypt. It's insanely difficult for anyone except crypto experts to figure out a sane selection of cipher suite, so why can't they not just include one or two sane presets with the application, that get updated along with it when algorithms are broken and new ones emerge?
    - nickik 11y ago
      I just went threw a full configuration and the cipther suit was the easiest. I had some guides and the basically said, copy this or this depending on how prohibitive you want it. The hardest thing to figure out is HPKP (and I still have not).
      - serge2k 11y ago
        are the guides up to date? I used https://cipherli.st/ https://cipherli.st/ hopefully it's good, if not it isn't protecting anything important really
- efesak 11y ago
  I think its not gona be easy as that - there has to be some croned process and some kind of error handling. (I created https://hub.docker.com/r/analogic/lemanager/ https://hub.docker.com/r/analogic/lemanager/ which does both but i am still waiting for some better "native" solution)
  - antsar 11y ago
    It could hypothetically be that easy, AFAICT. Nginx service runs constantly, so a module could presumably execute scheduled tasks. Those tasks could have error checking, sending errors to the root inbox.
dizzystar 11y ago
How ironic. I just added https to my site and was searching for a solution to this problem. I ended up using certonly --standalone as described here and it worked like a charm: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-nginx-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-14-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secu...
- herbst 11y ago
  I ended up still buying my certs because no solution seemed like something i should and could easily automate :/
pilif 11y ago
The official let's encrypt client is very heavy-weight. In my case I've build a much simpler thing using acmetool (https://github.com/hlandau/acme https://github.com/hlandau/acme) which is mcuh simpler to use and nicely runs without root rights. In my case, a lot of the routing of domains to customers is stored in a postgres database and a trigger fires an event anyways, so I have a little daemon that listens to these events and the fires off acmetool as needed in order go generate certificates. I just completed this last week, so when I've seen this article here, I thought that I just wasted some time over this because now there's an integrated nginx solution, but thankfully, this is just an article about doing what I was doing using a tool that's more complicated to use and brings half of an OS installation as dependencies. For those interested, https://gist.github.com/pilif/1e2610dd7aa57323e0b2 https://gist.github.com/pilif/1e2610dd7aa57323e0b2 is the script in question. It's really a quick hack, but it works very well for me to auto-create nginx config files.
- hlandau 11y ago
  I'm the author of acmetool. It's quite interesting to know that people are using the design to its full potential. Ideally, I should probably make something more library/daemon-based for these largescale, custom solutions, though of course I'd like to do it some manner of modular way that allows the existing codebase to be leveraged. For the time being only the acmeapi package within acmetool is stable and suitable for use by other libraries. Something to think about...
  - mholt 11y ago
    We should join forces with https://github.com/mholt/certs https://github.com/mholt/certs then. (Still in design phase.)
    - hlandau 11y ago
      I've done some thinking on what makes sense and ended up at this very rough first sketch. Comments welcome. https://gist.github.com/hlandau/ed6a96150c69945143be https://gist.github.com/hlandau/ed6a96150c69945143be
ceejayoz 11y ago
Has anyone found a good tutorial for DNS-based verification of a Let's Encrypt certificate? It'd simplify life greatly for those of us with multi-server clusters behind an Amazon ELB or something similar.
- yoo1I 11y ago
  Not a tutorial, but I was having trouble with that damn 'official' Letsencrypt client and the complexity of adding a .wellknown directory on every site I needed a certificate for. So I saw the light in the form of a bash-script [0], wrote a short hookscript, and now I can centrally manage through DNS. There are a couple of example scripts [1], and it really simple to write your own. [0] https://github.com/lukas2511/letsencrypt.sh https://github.com/lukas2511/letsencrypt.sh [1] https://github.com/lukas2511/letsencrypt.sh/wiki/Examples-for-DNS-01-hooks https://github.com/lukas2511/letsencrypt.sh/wiki/Examples-fo...
- veeti 11y ago
  If you don't mind renewing manually every 3 months, my manual client [1] does DNS. https://github.com/veeti/manuale https://github.com/veeti/manuale
realusername 11y ago
Here is my Nginx config for let's encrypt on my case, feel free to criticize or copy it: https://gist.github.com/alex-min/158f35f604b24e163ae9 https://gist.github.com/alex-min/158f35f604b24e163ae9. I've managed to get a A+ on the ssllab test so it should not be too bad I believe (but I'm not an expert so if you have some idea for improvements, I would be glad).
- majewsky 11y ago
  Here is my configuration: https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/master/hologram-nginx-and-letsencrypt.pkg.toml https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/master... Domains with this configuration get A+ on ssllabs and securityheaders.io (test with "repo.holocm.org" if you like). It includes an autorenewal script wrapped in a systemd timer unit. There is one bug, though: The autorenewal script fails because letsencrypt crashes when stdin is not a TTY. ( https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/issues/2523 https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/issues/2523 )
- nickik 11y ago
  You should also add HPKP (leaf pinning), it insanly powerful and a challange to get right. I have not figured out why the damn ssllabs complains about it to me.
  - realusername 11y ago
    I wanted to add it but I've seen all these warnings on the Internet about it and I'm not so sure I will be able to manage it if it does not work as expected. I've added X-Frame-Options, Strict-Transport-Security, X-Xss-Protection and X-Content-Type-Options because they have very few side-effects but I'm a bit afraid of HPKP.
  - tombrossman 11y ago
    I have the same problem, if I use one of the HPKP generators (or copy-paste a 'correct' example & substitute my cert hashes) I always get the SSL Labs error. Everything else is perfect. Depending on what guide I follow, I get Nginx errors, SSL Labs errors, or other third-party test errors. Never a consensus, which is what I would expect once everything is 100% correct. I'll have to set aside a few more hours to figure this out soon. Even good documentation like this is not working for me: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Public_Key_Pinning https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Public...
planetjones 11y ago
I tried using the official encrypt client on my low spec VPS this weekend (cent os 6). It wouldn't install as when compiling it runs out of memory. Why so heavyweight. Luckily I found a python script which uses the acme tools stuff and that worked fine. Maybe providing binaries would be another option so I don't have to compile everything myself.
- majewsky 11y ago
  What were you compiling? The official client is written in Python.
  - planetjones 11y ago
    The letscrypt auto thing.
    - rorosaurus 11y ago
      Yeah, their documentation isn't very clear that auto actually compiles a bunch of stuff on the fly for you. I ran into the same issue as you with my low-spec VPS as well. You can either add some swap space, or run just "letsencrypt -certonly" and skip the auto junk, but it sounds like you did that with the acme client already. :) I've got an open issue on their github page to try and clarify the memory requirements for low-spec VPS..
  - veeti 11y ago
    Third party libraries used by the client require C extensions.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
Thanks for the article and the other discusions, especially the pointers to Caddy. I have been using Cloudflare for https for my main site only and have been deciding whether to use Cloudflare for everything or bite the bullet and set up my own https.
- newman314 11y ago
  You should do both. HTTPS from user to CF HTTPS from CF to your site
andmarios 11y ago
I've made an ansible role for deploying many sites from one nginx instance with automatic issuing and renewal of let's encrypt certificates. It would be accompanied by a blog post to explain how things work but got busy on other fronts. If anyone's interested, it's at https://github.com/Landoop/ansible https://github.com/Landoop/ansible
benileo 11y ago
I had to add some extra nginx config to make this work ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; ssl_ciphers 'EECDH+AESGCM:EDH+AESGCM:AES256+EECDH:AES256+EDH';

164 points by cujanovic 11y ago

I wrote up my own HOWTO for nginx just the other day.https://www.uhoreg.ca/blog/20160218-1757 https://www.uhoreg.ca/blog/20160218-1757 I used the acme-tiny client instead of the official client. My post is mostly aimed at Debian-based distributions, but should be easily adaptable to others.

IgorPartola 11y ago

I was hoping this was an nginx module where you could specify something like `ssl_letsencrypt on;` and be done with it.

teekert 11y ago
Me too. I'm disappointed, this would be THE killer feature. Hope they are working on it (they should imho.)
joshmanders 11y ago
Caddy has this feature and it's amazing. https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  Wow. I might check try it out then.
  - xena 11y ago
    It really does do what it says it does. https://github.com/Xe/dotfiles/tree/master/ansible/roles/caddy/files/sites https://github.com/Xe/dotfiles/tree/master/ansible/roles/cad... https://xena.greedo.xeserv.us https://xena.greedo.xeserv.us
  - grey-area 11y ago
    I would definitely recommend it, I've replaced a few instances of nginx with it with no problems. It is based on the really solid net/http code from golang std lib and adds a few nice things like automatic tls/certs.
- pilif 11y ago
  this is how it should work. Very nice. I can't wait for other web servers to gain this ability too. Or at least allow us to load certificates from dynamic locations based on some request data. All other web servers I looked at (nginx, apache, lighttpd) still require at least a reload for an updated certificate and a configuration file change for a new certificate to be used. I wonder how caddy works with the very low 5 certificates per public suffix and week limit. Does it automatically bundle domains and request a single certificate with SANs?
  - joshmanders 11y ago
    > this is how it should work. Very nice. Yeah, Caddy is amazing. Matt is doing an awesome job with it. > I wonder how caddy works with the very low 5 certificates per public suffix and week limit. Does it automatically bundle domains and request a single certificate with SANs? I directed Matt to this discussion so I hope can answer these questions for you. I unfortunately cannot.
  - mholt 11y ago
    > this is how it should work. Very nice. Thanks for your comments; glad you like the way we integrated it! > Does it automatically bundle domains and request a single certificate with SANs? No, as it turns out, SAN makes the auto-management code highly complicated, since names could overlap in different certs, etc. It also complicates renewals and gives more room for error (e.g. 49 of the domains verify but 1 fails, so the cert can't be renewed). So I've opted not to support SAN certificates for the automatic HTTPS feature. But you can of course still issue your own SAN certificates and use those. Right now, Caddy reloads itself when it renews certificates, but as of Caddy 0.8.2 (slated for release any day now), Caddy will do it all in-process, no reloading.
  - jimjag 11y ago
    From what I can see, Caddy also does a reload. With Apache, you can do a Graceful restart and not lose any traffic, plus, using mod_lua you could create a relatively easy way to add this automagically.
    - 11y ago
- greggman 11y ago
  Know of an automated caddy docker reverse proxy container? Here's an nginx one. Took about < 5 mins to add to my docker-compose file and start proxying my existing site https://hub.docker.com/r/dmp1ce/nginx-proxy-letsencrypt/ https://hub.docker.com/r/dmp1ce/nginx-proxy-letsencrypt/ Would love to see a caddy version of same --- hmm, I guess the current caddy docker images can do this though though they need a little more configuration
  - joshmanders 11y ago
    There's ongoing discussion about this here: https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/199 https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/199 One of my tasks this week is to get this in motion.
nickblah 11y ago
If you're open to using OpenResty (basically nginx with some additional plugins and Lua integration), I've coincidentally been working on a plugin to make all of this completely automatic with Let's Encrypt (taking advantage of the relatively new ssl_certificate_by_lua functionality OpenResty provides): https://github.com/GUI/lua-resty-auto-ssl https://github.com/GUI/lua-resty-auto-ssl We just rolled it out to our first production site last week, but any feedback would be welcome.
dheera 11y ago
Or better yet, make "ssl_letsencrypt on;" the default. Make it so that newbies can just apt-get install nginx/apache/lighttpd/etc. and have https up and running, no questions asked. The real reason https adoption isn't up to par has less to do with people not willing to spend money, and more because it's not up by default. Now that https is free, please make it enabled by default.
- mholt 11y ago
  Check out Caddy, which enables HTTPS by default: https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https
- majewsky 11y ago
  That was something that I complained about even before letsencrypt. It's insanely difficult for anyone except crypto experts to figure out a sane selection of cipher suite, so why can't they not just include one or two sane presets with the application, that get updated along with it when algorithms are broken and new ones emerge?
  - nickik 11y ago
    I just went threw a full configuration and the cipther suit was the easiest. I had some guides and the basically said, copy this or this depending on how prohibitive you want it. The hardest thing to figure out is HPKP (and I still have not).
    - serge2k 11y ago
      are the guides up to date? I used https://cipherli.st/ https://cipherli.st/ hopefully it's good, if not it isn't protecting anything important really
efesak 11y ago
I think its not gona be easy as that - there has to be some croned process and some kind of error handling. (I created https://hub.docker.com/r/analogic/lemanager/ https://hub.docker.com/r/analogic/lemanager/ which does both but i am still waiting for some better "native" solution)
- antsar 11y ago
  It could hypothetically be that easy, AFAICT. Nginx service runs constantly, so a module could presumably execute scheduled tasks. Those tasks could have error checking, sending errors to the root inbox.

dizzystar 11y ago

How ironic. I just added https to my site and was searching for a solution to this problem. I ended up using certonly --standalone as described here and it worked like a charm: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-nginx-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-14-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secu...

herbst 11y ago
I ended up still buying my certs because no solution seemed like something i should and could easily automate :/

pilif 11y ago

The official let's encrypt client is very heavy-weight. In my case I've build a much simpler thing using acmetool (https://github.com/hlandau/acme https://github.com/hlandau/acme) which is mcuh simpler to use and nicely runs without root rights. In my case, a lot of the routing of domains to customers is stored in a postgres database and a trigger fires an event anyways, so I have a little daemon that listens to these events and the fires off acmetool as needed in order go generate certificates. I just completed this last week, so when I've seen this article here, I thought that I just wasted some time over this because now there's an integrated nginx solution, but thankfully, this is just an article about doing what I was doing using a tool that's more complicated to use and brings half of an OS installation as dependencies. For those interested, https://gist.github.com/pilif/1e2610dd7aa57323e0b2 https://gist.github.com/pilif/1e2610dd7aa57323e0b2 is the script in question. It's really a quick hack, but it works very well for me to auto-create nginx config files.

hlandau 11y ago
I'm the author of acmetool. It's quite interesting to know that people are using the design to its full potential. Ideally, I should probably make something more library/daemon-based for these largescale, custom solutions, though of course I'd like to do it some manner of modular way that allows the existing codebase to be leveraged. For the time being only the acmeapi package within acmetool is stable and suitable for use by other libraries. Something to think about...
- mholt 11y ago
  We should join forces with https://github.com/mholt/certs https://github.com/mholt/certs then. (Still in design phase.)
  - hlandau 11y ago
    I've done some thinking on what makes sense and ended up at this very rough first sketch. Comments welcome. https://gist.github.com/hlandau/ed6a96150c69945143be https://gist.github.com/hlandau/ed6a96150c69945143be

ceejayoz 11y ago

Has anyone found a good tutorial for DNS-based verification of a Let's Encrypt certificate? It'd simplify life greatly for those of us with multi-server clusters behind an Amazon ELB or something similar.

yoo1I 11y ago
Not a tutorial, but I was having trouble with that damn 'official' Letsencrypt client and the complexity of adding a .wellknown directory on every site I needed a certificate for. So I saw the light in the form of a bash-script [0], wrote a short hookscript, and now I can centrally manage through DNS. There are a couple of example scripts [1], and it really simple to write your own. [0] https://github.com/lukas2511/letsencrypt.sh https://github.com/lukas2511/letsencrypt.sh [1] https://github.com/lukas2511/letsencrypt.sh/wiki/Examples-for-DNS-01-hooks https://github.com/lukas2511/letsencrypt.sh/wiki/Examples-fo...
veeti 11y ago
If you don't mind renewing manually every 3 months, my manual client [1] does DNS. https://github.com/veeti/manuale https://github.com/veeti/manuale

realusername 11y ago

Here is my Nginx config for let's encrypt on my case, feel free to criticize or copy it: https://gist.github.com/alex-min/158f35f604b24e163ae9 https://gist.github.com/alex-min/158f35f604b24e163ae9. I've managed to get a A+ on the ssllab test so it should not be too bad I believe (but I'm not an expert so if you have some idea for improvements, I would be glad).

majewsky 11y ago
Here is my configuration: https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/master/hologram-nginx-and-letsencrypt.pkg.toml https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/master... Domains with this configuration get A+ on ssllabs and securityheaders.io (test with "repo.holocm.org" if you like). It includes an autorenewal script wrapped in a systemd timer unit. There is one bug, though: The autorenewal script fails because letsencrypt crashes when stdin is not a TTY. ( https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/issues/2523 https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/issues/2523 )
nickik 11y ago
You should also add HPKP (leaf pinning), it insanly powerful and a challange to get right. I have not figured out why the damn ssllabs complains about it to me.
- realusername 11y ago
  I wanted to add it but I've seen all these warnings on the Internet about it and I'm not so sure I will be able to manage it if it does not work as expected. I've added X-Frame-Options, Strict-Transport-Security, X-Xss-Protection and X-Content-Type-Options because they have very few side-effects but I'm a bit afraid of HPKP.
- tombrossman 11y ago
  I have the same problem, if I use one of the HPKP generators (or copy-paste a 'correct' example & substitute my cert hashes) I always get the SSL Labs error. Everything else is perfect. Depending on what guide I follow, I get Nginx errors, SSL Labs errors, or other third-party test errors. Never a consensus, which is what I would expect once everything is 100% correct. I'll have to set aside a few more hours to figure this out soon. Even good documentation like this is not working for me: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Public_Key_Pinning https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Public...

planetjones 11y ago

I tried using the official encrypt client on my low spec VPS this weekend (cent os 6). It wouldn't install as when compiling it runs out of memory. Why so heavyweight. Luckily I found a python script which uses the acme tools stuff and that worked fine. Maybe providing binaries would be another option so I don't have to compile everything myself.

majewsky 11y ago
What were you compiling? The official client is written in Python.
- planetjones 11y ago
  The letscrypt auto thing.
  - rorosaurus 11y ago
    Yeah, their documentation isn't very clear that auto actually compiles a bunch of stuff on the fly for you. I ran into the same issue as you with my low-spec VPS as well. You can either add some swap space, or run just "letsencrypt -certonly" and skip the auto junk, but it sounds like you did that with the acme client already. :) I've got an open issue on their github page to try and clarify the memory requirements for low-spec VPS..
- veeti 11y ago
  Third party libraries used by the client require C extensions.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

Thanks for the article and the other discusions, especially the pointers to Caddy. I have been using Cloudflare for https for my main site only and have been deciding whether to use Cloudflare for everything or bite the bullet and set up my own https.

newman314 11y ago
You should do both. HTTPS from user to CF HTTPS from CF to your site

andmarios 11y ago

I've made an ansible role for deploying many sites from one nginx instance with automatic issuing and renewal of let's encrypt certificates. It would be accompanied by a blog post to explain how things work but got busy on other fronts. If anyone's interested, it's at https://github.com/Landoop/ansible https://github.com/Landoop/ansible

benileo 11y ago

I had to add some extra nginx config to make this work ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; ssl_ciphers 'EECDH+AESGCM:EDH+AESGCM:AES256+EECDH:AES256+EDH';