Creating SSL Certificates

Paymenter's official guide to generating SSL certificates. An SSL certificate secures your site, displaying the padlock icon and "Secure" label in browsers.

1. Installing Certbot

First, we need to install Certbot.

Nginx

sudo apt install -y python3-certbot-nginx

Apache

sudo apt install -y python3-certbot-apache

Other

sudo apt install -y certbot

2. Creating the Certificate

Using Certbot, we will create the certificate.

IMPORTANT

Make sure you are not running anything on port 80 — Certbot will not work if anything is using it. You can check with:

sudo lsof -i :80

Nginx

sudo systemctl stop nginx
certbot certonly --nginx -d example.com

Apache

sudo systemctl stop apache2
certbot certonly --apache -d example.com

Other

certbot certonly --standalone -d example.com

IMPORTANT

Replace example.com with your actual domain name.

Renewing Your SSL Certificate

Your SSL certificates are now active, but they expire automatically and need to be renewed regularly. You can renew them manually by running:

sudo certbot renew

Or, you can automate this using a cron job, which is the recommended approach.

Run the following command to open the cronjob file:

crontab -e

Paste the following line at the bottom of the file. This example will run the renewal process every day at 11:00 PM:

0 23 * * * certbot renew --quiet --deploy-hook 'systemctl restart nginx'

[!IMPORTANT] Make sure to replace "nginx" with the name of your webserver (e.g., apache2 or another if you're using something else).

You can customize how often this job runs using this website.