Let's Encrypt
Let’s encrypt is a free, automated, and open Certification Authority.
That’s what’s said on the main page of their website. I’ve been looking into this thing for so long, but just now that I have learned that they provide a way to manually generate certificates for shared web hosting with no root shell access like the one I use. However, upon further investigation, and as I try to generate that certificate myself, I found that their documentation is lacking in terms of clarity, especially for my specific use case. In case you didn’t notice, I have successfuly generated the certificate, but not without any hurdles. That’s what I’m going to share here.
The steps are as follows (assuming you use Ubuntu or any equivalent distributions):
- Download certbot by using the command:
wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto. - Mark it as executable:
chmod a+x ./certbot-auto - Begin to obtain certificate:
./certbot-auto certonly --manual -d www.example.com -d example.com - You will be asked to create some files with certain content in your public_html. Do each of that, and then you will get your certificate.
- Your certificate will be located at
/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem, - and your private-key will be located at
/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem. - Copy them to your web hosting, install them, and you’re good to go.
That’s all. I hope this helps. Cheers.