Custom web server on https in minutes. Using Certbot in Azure

Wednesday, Sep 13th 2023
nodes

Creating your own website has never been so easy. The aim of this blog is to explain how to do it in a few steps and what tools or platforms to use to do it.

I'll describe how I created my website, which runs in Digital Ocean's environment. It is an environment that is similar to Microsoft's Azure. Here we can create different virtual machines that can have different configurations depending on their performance and capacity requirements. My focus was to ensure that the web server gets an "A" rating from both www.ssllabs.com and https://observatory.mozilla.org. In order for a web server to receive such a rating, it must meet strict requirements for the SSL certificate and the configuration of the Apache client itself. 

Digital Ocean Certbot

I would also mention the key role of Certbot, which is the tool that communicates with https://letsencrypt.org/. Let's Encrypt is a certificate authority that is used to issue SSL certificates. Its sponsors are large corporations like Chrome, Facebook, Cisco, and others who are trying to improve the quality and security of the network. An important factor is that certificates from this authority are completely free and meet the aforementioned strict certificate quality requirements.

An integral part of my work is using certificates for testing on the cloud in Digital Services. Here we can use automatic generation using Certbot. For this, we already need to move to Azure, where we run a VM with Ubuntu for testing purposes.

Certbot

 

Certbot