# Creating SSL Certificates

This tutorial briefly covers creating new SSL certificates for your panel and daemon.

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 (opens new window) for installation instructions. We have also included a command below to install certbot's NGINX/Apache plugin so you won't have to stop your webserver.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y certbot
# Run this if you use Nginx
sudo apt install -y python3-certbot-nginx
# Run this if you use Apache
sudo apt install -y python3-certbot-apache

# 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 use the webserver-specific certbot plugin you just installed.

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.

Since we are using certbot's NGINX/Apache plugin, you won't need to restart your webserver to have the certificate applied (assuming that you've already configured the webservers to use SSL).

# Nginx
certbot certonly --nginx -d example.com
# Apache
certbot certonly --apache -d example.com
# Standalone - Use this if neither works. Make sure to stop your webserver first when using this method.
certbot certonly --standalone -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 (opens new window) 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