Renewing SSL Certificate
The day has finally come. My SSL certificate with StartSSL has expired. I tried renewing it, but their site was down. Also they had warnings saying that major browsers would stop supporting certificates issued by them. So I guess that’s means it is time to jump ship to Let’s Encrypt.
Let’s Encrypt made it easy to create an SSL certificate. And best of all, it’s free (they highly recommend donating to EFF). They have a tool called certbot that is a brilliant swiss-army knife for SSL certficates. It allows you to generate new certificates with one command or even to renew and automatically renew them. The best part about it was that the error messages are very clear. Obviously, I’m an idiot and can never get a command to automatically work on the first try. So when I ran the command to generate a new certificate for a specific domain, it said that it doesn’t support multiple virtualnamehosts in a single file. And that’s exactly what the issue was! I simply split up the virtualnamehosts by port 80 and port 443 into separate files and it worked like a charm.
My previous experience with all-purpose tools like this is they usually compromise with error messages. They often are not very descriptive.
After I generated the separate .conf files that I needed for all my subdomains and domains, and generated all their certificates, I simply created a cronjob that runs twice daily to renew the certificates. If the certificates are not up for renewal, they simply won’t renew. It’s brilliant.