Creating SSL Certificates
This tutorial briefly covers creating new SSL certificates for your panel and daemon using LetsEncrypt™.
Method 1: Using Certbot
To begin, we will be installing certbot, a simple script that will automatically renew our certificates and allow much cleaner creation of them. The command below is for Ubuntu distributions, but you can always check Certbot's official site for installation instructions.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
sudo apt update
sudo apt install certbot
Creating a Certificate
After installing certbot, we need to then generate a certificate. There are a couple ways to do that, but the easiest is to have letsencrypt spin-up a temporary web-server to do this. In order for this to work, you will first need to stop NGINX or Apache.
Then, in the command below, you should replace example.com with the domain you would like to generate a certificate
for. If you have multiple domains you would like certificates for, simply add more -d anotherdomain.com flags to the
command. You can also look into generating a wildcard certificate but that is not covered in this tutorial.
Once you've generated the certificate you should start NGINX or Apache again to have the certificates applied (assuming that you've already configured the webservers to use SSL).
certbot certonly -d example.com
Auto Renewal
You'll also probably want to configure automatic renewal by adding the command below to a cronjob that runs daily. You can add the command below to that crontab. For advanced users, we suggest installing and using acme.sh which provides more options (see below), and is much more powerful than certbot.
certbot renew
Troubleshooting
If you get an Insecure Connection or related error when trying to access your panel, it is likely that the SSL certificate has expired.
This can be easily fixed by renewing the SSL certificate, although using the command certbot renew won't do the job. As it'll give a error like: Error: Attempting to renew cert (domain) from /etc/letsencrypt/renew/domain.conf produced an unexpected error.
This will happen especially if you're running NGINX instead of Apache. The solution for this is to stop NGINX, then renew the certificate, finally restart NGINX.
Stop NGINX:
systemctl stop nginx
Renew the certificate:
certbot renew
Once the process has complete, you can restart the NGINX service:
systemctl start nginx