Secure Nginx with Let’s Encrypt on CentOS 8

Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority developed by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) that provides free SSL certificates.

Certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt are trusted by all major browsers and valid for 90 days from the issue date.

In this tutorial, we’ll provide a step by step instructions about how to install a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate on CentOS 8 running Nginx as a web server. We’ll also show how to configure Nginx to use the SSL certificate and enable HTTP/2.

Prerequisites #

Before you proceed, make sure that you have met the following prerequisites:

• You have a domain name pointing to your public IP. We’ll use example.com.
• You have Nginx installed
  on your CentOS server.
• Your firewall
  is configured to accept connections on ports 80 and 443.

Installing Certbot #

Certbot is a free command-line tool that simplifies the process for obtaining and renewing Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates from and auto-enabling HTTPS on your server.

The certbot package is not included in the standard CentOS 8 repositories, but it can be downloaded from the vendor’s website.

Run the following wget
command as root or sudo user
to download the certbot script to the /usr/local/bin directory:

sudo wget -P /usr/local/bin https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto

Once the download is complete, make the file executable
:

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto

Generating Strong Dh (Diffie-Hellman) Group #

Diffie–Hellman key exchange (DH) is a method of securely exchanging cryptographic keys over an unsecured communication channel.

Generate a new set of 2048 bit DH parameters by typing the following command:

sudo openssl dhparam -out /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem 2048

If you want you can change the key length up to 4096 bits, but the generation may take more than 30 minutes, depending on the system entropy.

Obtaining a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate #

To obtain an SSL certificate for the domain, we’re going to use the Webroot plugin that works by creating a temporary file for validating the requested domain in the ${webroot-path}/.well-known/acme-challenge directory. The Let’s Encrypt server makes HTTP requests to the temporary file to validate that the requested domain resolves to the server where certbot runs.

To make it more simple we’re going to map all HTTP requests for .well-known/acme-challenge to a single directory, /var/lib/letsencrypt.

The following commands will create the directory and make it writable for the Nginx server.

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/letsencrypt/.well-knownsudo chgrp nginx /var/lib/letsencryptsudo chmod g+s /var/lib/letsencrypt

To avoid duplicating code, create the following two snippets which will be included in all Nginx server block files:

sudo mkdir /etc/nginx/snippets

/etc/nginx/snippets/letsencrypt.conf

location ^~ /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
  allow all;
  root /var/lib/letsencrypt/;
  default_type "text/plain";
  try_files $uri =404;
}

/etc/nginx/snippets/ssl.conf

ssl_dhparam /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem;

ssl_session_timeout 1d;
ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m;
ssl_session_tickets off;

ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
ssl_ciphers ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers off;

ssl_stapling on;
ssl_stapling_verify on;
resolver 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 valid=300s;
resolver_timeout 30s;

add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000" always;
add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;

The snippet above includes the chippers recommended by Mozilla
, enables OCSP Stapling, HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), and enforces few security‑focused HTTP headers.

Once the snippets are created, open the domain server block and include the letsencrypt.conf snippet, as shown below:

/etc/nginx/conf.d/example.com.conf

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name example.com www.example.com;

  include snippets/letsencrypt.conf;
}

Reload the Nginx configuration for changes to take effect:

sudo systemctl reload nginx

Run the certbot tool with the webroot plugin to obtain the SSL certificate files for your domain:

sudo /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto certonly --agree-tos --email [email protected] --webroot -w /var/lib/letsencrypt/ -d example.com -d www.example.com

If this the first time you invoke certbot, the tool will install the missing dependencies.

Once the SSL certificate is successfully obtained, certbot will print the following message:

IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem
   Your key file has been saved at:
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem
   Your cert will expire on 2020-03-12. To obtain a new or tweaked
   version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot-auto
   again. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run
   "certbot-auto renew"
 - If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by:

   Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt:   https://letsencrypt.org/donate
   Donating to EFF:                    https://eff.org/donate-le

Now that you have the certificate files, you can edit your domain server block
as follows:

/etc/nginx/conf.d/example.com.conf

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.example.com example.com;

    include snippets/letsencrypt.conf;
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    server_name www.example.com;

    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
    ssl_trusted_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/chain.pem;
    include snippets/ssl.conf;
    include snippets/letsencrypt.conf;

    return 301 https://example.com$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    server_name example.com;

    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
    ssl_trusted_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/chain.pem;
    include snippets/ssl.conf;
    include snippets/letsencrypt.conf;

    # . . . other code
}

With the configuration above we are forcing HTTPS
and redirecting the www to non www version.

Finally, reload the Nginx service
for changes to take effect:

sudo systemctl reload nginx

Now, open your website using https://, and you’ll notice a green lock icon.

If you test your domain using the SSL Labs Server Test
, you’ll get an A+ grade, as shown in the image below:

Auto-renewing Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate #

Let’s Encrypt’s certificates are valid for 90 days. To automatically renew the certificates before they expire, create a cronjob
that will run twice a day and automatically renew any certificate 30 days before expiration.

Use the crontab command to create a new cronjob:

sudo crontab -e

Paste the following line:

0 */12 * * * root test -x /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto -a ! -d /run/systemd/system && perl -e 'sleep int(rand(3600))' && /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto -q renew --renew-hook "systemctl reload nginx"

Save and close the file.

To test the renewal process, you can use the certbot command followed by the --dry-run switch:

sudo ./certbot-auto renew --dry-run

If there are no errors, it means that the test renewal process was successful.

Conclusion #

In this tutorial, we’ve shown you how to use the Let’s Encrypt client, certbot to download SSL certificates for your domain. We’ve also created Nginx snippets to avoid duplicating code and configured Nginx to use the certificates. At the end of the tutorial, we’ve set up a cronjob for automatic certificate renewal.

To learn more about Certbot, visit their documentation
page.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment.