It’s true. You do not have to pay 200 bucks just to get HTTPS working on your Website.

Certbot

Certbot issues Let’s Encrypt Certificates. Note that these Certificates will have a validity of 90 Days. Therefore make sure you renew these before the expiration date. Certbot can automatically renew these Certificates for you. But I am not going to go into details on that. I am only going to explain how to get these Certificates manually using the Command Line.

First install Certbot on your machine.

Now you can run the below command to generate the Certs. I will verify the ownership of the domain by adding a TXT record.

Say Y or N to the following.

Do not hit Enter here until you add the TXT records.

Go to GoDaddy and add a TXT record. Note that the host is _acme-challenge.localhost as GoDaddy appends .kubefire.com to that automatically.

It may take a minute or two for the changes to propagate. Use dig command below to check if the TXT record is added.

dig will not print anything if the record is not there.

Hit Enter when you see an output for TXT lookup. If you have done everything right you will see the below message.

Testing

To test I will write a simple Node.js HTTPS Server.

Run it by using the below command.

Before hitting the server, I will add an A record called localhost pointing to 127.0.0.1 for my kubefire.com domain( weirdly this works :blush:). When you hit https://localhost.kubefire.com:8443/ from the browser you should be able to see the Green Lock Icon which indicates that the Certificate is valid.

In my next post I will look at ways to automate this process with GoDaddy.