Add HTTPS to an Nginx website hosted on Digital Ocean

SSH into server as sudo user

You need to be logged in as a sudo user since some of the subsequent commands require sudo privileges.

Install snapd

Install snapd if you haven’t already. Ubuntu 18.04 and up should already have it installed.

Ensure your snapd version is up to date

sudo snap install core; sudo snap refresh core

Remove any Certbot OS packages

Let’s remove any existing Certbot command.

sudo apt-get remove certbot

Install Certbot snap

sudo snap install --classic certbot

Prepare Certbot command

sudo ln -s /snap/bin/certbot /usr/bin/certbot

Install certificates

Run the following command to acquire and install certificates for example.com and *.example.com (replace with your own domain):

sudo certbot --nginx -d example.sajadtorkamani.com -d www.example.sajadtorkamani.com

This command does a few things:

• Installs the SSL certificates at /etc/letsencrypt/live
• Configures your Nginx config to listen on the SSL port 443
• Configures your Nginx config to redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS

You can also choose to only generate the certificates and manually modify your Nginx configs by running sudo certbot certonly followed by the same arguments and flags as above.

The certbot tool is pretty clever so it will interactively prompt you for actions/confirmations when it detects any existing configuration that may be problematic.

Sources

• Certbot docs
• certbot-dns-digitalocean