Installing the Certbot Let’s Encrypt Client for NGINX on Amazon Linux 2

Installing the Certbot Let’s Encrypt Client

The certbot package is not available through the package manager by default. You will need to enable the EPEL repository to install Certbot.

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install certbot-nginx

Set Up NGINX

certbot can automatically configure NGINX for SSL/TLS. It looks for and modifies the server block in your NGINX configuration that contains a server_name directive with the domain name you’re requesting a certificate for. In our example, the domain is www.mydomain.com.

Assuming you’re starting with a fresh NGINX install, use a text editor to create a file in the /etc/nginx/conf.d directory named domain_name.conf (so in our example, www.mydomain.com.conf).

Specify your domain name (and variants, if any) with the server_name directive:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server;
    root /var/www/html;
    server_name mydomain.com www.mydoamin.com;
}

Save the file, then run this command to verify the syntax of your configuration and restart NGINX:

$ sudo nginx -t && sudo nginx -s reload

Obtaining a Certificate

To execute the interactive installation and obtain a certificate that covers only a single domain, run the certbot command with:

sudo certbot --nginx -d mydomain.be -d www.mydomain.be

Setting Up Auto Renewal

Edit the crontab to create a new job that will run the renewal twice per day. To edit the crontab for the root user, run:

sudo crontab -e

Add the certbot command to run daily. In this example, we run the command every day at 02.00a.m. . The command checks to see if the certificate on the server will expire within the next 30 days, and renews it if so. The --quiet directive tells certbot not to generate output.

0 2 * * * sudo /usr/bin/certbot renew --quiet

Done!