Setting up Let’s Encrypt

in Categories: Let's Encrypt, Linux.


Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).

With Let’s encrypt you can set up an SSL certificate to your web server.

We discover how to setup and install Let’s encrypt on Debian, because you don’t usually see a web server that runs on Arch Linux. We also assume that you are running Apache web server.

Install Certbot

First you need to install certbot.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install certbot

Now that you have installed certbot. Let’s try to create an SSL certificate to your web server.

sudo certbot --apache

If you get the following warning or error:

Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log

The requested apache plugin does not appear to be installed.

You need to install the following package:

sudo apt install python3-certbot-apache

Then run the sudo certbot --apache command again.

Optional and not tested

If you are running Nginx web server, you can try this installation method, but replace apache with nginx.