Static website hosting with NGINX and LetsEncrypt

Bogdan Ungureanu
Linux

Static site generators are a fantastic way to manage a website. Static sites are faster and safer than dynamic sites. Nginx is an ideal web server for serving these static files.

The NGINX package is not apart of standard installation packages and we need to enable epel repository.

# yum install epel-release

To install the NGINX server and LetsEncrypt client on the Linux distribution that supports yum, such as Fedora and CentOS, run the following command:

# yum install nginx certbot python2-certbot-nginx

on Ubuntu/Debian based systems you may need to run the following command

# sudo apt-get install nginx certbot python-certbot-nginx

Certbot can automatically configure NGINX for SSL/TLS. It looks for and modifies the server block in your NGINX configuration that contains a server_name directive with the domain name you’re requesting a certificate for. In our example, the domain is www.domain.ro.

server {
    listen 80 ;
    listen [::]:80;
    root /home/domain.ro/public_html;
    server_name example.ro www.example.ro;
}

The NGINX server needs to be restarted to use the web validation method.

# nginx -t && nginx -s reload

We are going to retrieve the first manual certificate by running the following:

# letsencrypt run -d domain.ro -d www.domain.ro

Adding a new record into crontab will enable automatic certificate renewals.

# crontab -e
30 3 * * *  /usr/bin/letsencrypt renew --cert-name domain.ro --post-hook "/bin/systemctl restart nginx" --quiet