Previously, the easiest way to add an SSL certificate to an EC2 instance (and still the Amazon recommended way it appears) has been to create a certificate (free) from Amazon through the certificate manager and then adding that cert to a CloudFront or ELB instance (both of which cost money).
I’ve been successful in using LetsEncrypt to provide SSL for websites running under Windows Server in EC2 using the fantastic Windows ACME Simple (WACS) (previously known as letsencrypt-win-simple (LEWS)). If this is your need, you can always grab the lastest instance on GitHub.
I never seemed to find the correct set of steps to do this on the Amazon Linux instances. However, due to the work of Lawrence McDaniel, I discovered this blog post. He walks you through step by step on how to install mod24_ssl, CertBot (from EFF) and then how to run CertBot to create and install a LetsEncrypt SSL cert on one or more sites on your Apache-served Amazon Linux instance. He also shows you how to use crontab to set up a recurring job to renew the certificates on a regular basis (a necessity since LetsEncrypt certificates expire after 90 days.
Well done Lawrence!
BTW – crontab defaults to vi as the editor. If you aren’t used to using this beast (I know, some people love it) what you really need to know is that you press the letter i on your keyboard to enter INSERT mode so you can edit the file, hit ESC to exit the INSERT mode and then enter “:wq” (without the quotes of course) to write and quite (save and exit) or just “:q” to quit without saving your changes.
At Over The Top and Exhibit A Communications, I've programmed solutions for Google as well as at least one other company that was later acquired by Google.
I've been CTO of an Internet SaaS company and spent my time pretty evenly between guiding the future technical strategy of the company, architecting software solutions for my dev teams, designing and running a data center to service our clients world-wide as well as being a technical evangalist/sales engineer to our media clients large and small.
I've also been Chief Photographer of the Daily Sun/Post newspaper back when it was a 5-day a week daily newspaper.
I also spent a great many years as a beach lifeguardfor the City of San Clemente as well as Jr. Lifeguard instructor and then as it's program coordinator.
Bragging rights
Private Pilot with Instrument rating and proud husband of soon to be 25 years (and counting).
- Setting up SSL on Amazon Linux Instance under EC2 - July 26, 2018
- Method Chaining of Objects in C# - January 16, 2017
- Native SQL Backup And Restores on AWS RDS - November 9, 2016