Deployment of Static Sites with Nginx and Certbot

This note introduces how to deploy a https-enabled static website with nginx and certbot.

Nginx Configuration

Suppose you already have the nginx package installed in your Linux system.
For a simple static site located at /home/evan/blog/public, we can have it up runing with the a simple configuration located at /etc/nginx/conf.d/your_domain.conf, which writes as

server {
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name your_domain;
  
  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/your_domain/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/your_domain/privkey.pem;

  root /home/lighthouse/blog/public;
  index index.html; # name of index page
  location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|js|pdf|txt){
    root /home/lighthouse/blog/public;
  } # access to static files
}

After your are done editing, don’t forget to run nginx -s reload to apply the new configuration.

If you aim to implement more advanced features, you should add more details or even a couple of more configuration files, please refer to the official nginx documentation.

I believe that now you wonder how to get those SSL certificate and key.

Get the SSL Certificate

You can require a paid one from some SSL certificate organization. Nevertheless for us non-commercial users, we can simply generate a free certificate by ourselves, with the help of certbot, a certification helper that supports the automatic certification APIs provided by letsencrypt organization.

To generate one, all you need are the certbot installed and a legally owned domain name. The command is as follows

sudo certbot certonly --standalone -d your_domain_name

There are some points to be aware of:

• You should have ports 443 and 80 unoccupied before running the command.
• Your domain name should be well resolved by DNS service providers and pointed to your current machine.
• In China, in order to build a healthy Internet environment, the authorities require us to file our website information with the relevant department and obtain confirmation, otherwise the domain name won’t resolve properly and no SSL certificate can be obtained.

nginx, ssl, https, static website, letsencrypt, certbot — Jan 24, 2023