How to: Install Certbot-auto on Ubuntu Linux VPS to Create SSL Certificates

Certbot is an easy-to-use automatic client that fetches and deploys SSL/TLS certificates for your webserver. Certbot was developed by EFF and others as a client for Let’s Encrypt and was previously known as “the official Let’s Encrypt client” or “the Let’s Encrypt Python client.” Certbot will also work with any other CAs that support the ACME protocol.

  How to Install Certbot-auto on Ubuntu Linux VPS to Create SSL Certificates

Note: Currently package repositories do not have the latest version of Certbot available. To circumvent this we use Certbot-auto to get the latest version.

Downloading and Installing Certbot-auto

1. Log into your Ubuntu VPS and update the server's packages

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

2. Install or update the wget package

apt-get install wget

3. Download and enable permissions for Certbot-auto

wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto
chmod a+x ./certbot-auto

4. Install Certbot-auto

./certbot-auto --install-only

Creating an SSL Certificate

1. Check the help for Certbot-auto and utilize the correct plugin for your web server

./certbot-auto --help

2. For example: to run using an Apache webserver

./certbot-auto --apache

3. Specify an email address to regain control of a lost certificate and receive urgent security notices

4. Agree to the Terms of Service

5. Follow the onscreen prompts to complete setting up your certificate

6. If everything worked properly, you should receive a message similar to the following

IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/www.example.com/fullchain.pem
   Your key file has been saved at:
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/www.example.com/privkey.pem
   Your cert will expire on 2018-09-10. To obtain a new or tweaked
   version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot-auto
   again with the "certonly" option. To non-interactively renew *all*
   of your certificates, run "certbot-auto renew"
 - If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by:

   Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt:   https://letsencrypt.org/donate
   Donating to EFF:                    https://eff.org/donate-le

Now that you have installed Cerbot-auto and obtained SSL certificates, you can configure packages that support commercial or self-signed SSL certificates to use them.

Certbot Community Support

Certbot Documentation

Certbot FAQ