How To Secure Apache with Let’s Encrypt on Ubuntu 20.04
Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority (CA) that facilitates obtaining and installing free TLS/SSL certificates, thereby enabling encrypted HTTPS on web servers. It simplifies the process by providing a software client, Certbot, that attempts to automate most (if not all) of the required steps. Currently, the entire process of obtaining and installing a certificate is fully automated on both Apache and Nginx. In this guide, we’ll use Certbot to obtain a free SSL certificate for Apache on Ubuntu 20.04, and make sure this certificate is set up to renew automatically. This tutorial uses a separate virtual host file instead of Apache’s default configuration file for setting up the website that will be secured by Let’s Encrypt. We recommend creating new Apache virtual host files for each domain hosted in a server, because it helps to avoid common mistakes and maintains the default configuration files as a fallback setup.