Pieter Van Leuven pietervanleuven

Let's Encrypt on Ubuntu 14.04, nginx with webroot auth

This document details how I setup LE on my server. Firstly, install the client as described on http://letsencrypt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/using.html and make sure you can execute it. I put it in /root/letsencrypt.

As it is not possible to change the ports used for the standalone authenticator and I already have a nginx running on port 80/443, I opted to use the webroot method for each of my domains (note that LE does not issue wildcard certificates by design, so you probably want to get a cert for www.example.com and example.com).

Configuration

For this, I placed config files into etc/letsencrypt/configs, named after <domain>.conf. The files are simple:

Full blog post can be found here: http://pnommensen.com/2014/09/07/high-performance-ghost-configuration-with-nginx/

Ghost is an open source platform for blogging founded by John O'Nolan and Hannah Wolfe. It's a node.js application and therefore works great in conjunction with nginx. This guide will will help you create a high performance nginx virtual host configuration for Ghost.

"Don't use #nodejs for static content" - @trevnorris. If #nginx isn't sitting in front of your node server, you're probably doing it wrong.
— Bryan Hughes (@nebrius) August 30, 2014

The node.js application runs on a port on your server

	#!/bin/bash

	# Created on 7/17/13 by Ryan Sechrest
	# Deploys pushed branch from the origin repository to the web directory

	if [[ (-n $1) && (-n $2) && (-n $3) ]]; then

	# Set path to project directory
	project_path="/var/www/domains/$2/$3"

	# sets the proxy cache path location, max size 2g
	proxy_cache_path /data/nginx/cache levels=1:2 keys_zone=STATIC:100m inactive=24h max_size=2g;

	# transfers the `Host` header to the backend
	proxy_set_header Host $host;

	# uses the defined STATIC cache zone
	proxy_cache STATIC;

	# cache 200 10 minutes, 404 1 minute, others status codes not cached