I don’t hate Let’s Encrypt anymore
So, Rachel is in a bad mood: Why I still have an old-school cert on my https site and I feel her. Like her, for my own sites I have always been running Apache. There was never much need to upgrade, the software was available, stable, and fast enough.
At some point in time, I needed TLS and started to use Let’s Encrypt .
That was messy: Running dehydrated , a bunch of haphazard shell scripts trying to get certificates authenticated and installed, through a wild chain of callbacks and sourced scripts all over the system, driven by Cron, and with bad alerting.
None of that was necessary.
Turns out, starting with Apache 2.4.30 (19-Feb-2018), Apache supports mod_md , and that supports Let’s Encrypt out of the box. For good measure, I also enabled mod_macro .
This being an Ubuntu, I put this into my /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf:
ServerName mybasedomain.koehntopp.de
MDomain mybasedomain.koehntopp.de contentdomain.koehntopp.de proxydomain.koehntopp.de
MDContactEmail user@example.com
MDCerticateAgreement accepted
MDPrivateKeys RSA 4096
There is no additional “SSLEngine” needed, except SSLEngine on.
I also add two macros that I use a lot to create virtual hosts to the same file. One is for straight-up content domains:
<Macro VHost $host>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName $host
ServerAdmin user@example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/$host
<Directory /var/www/$host>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Require all granted
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error-$host.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access-$host.log combined
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [R=301,L]
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:443>
ServerName $host
ServerAdmin user@example.com
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error-$host.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access-$host.log combined
DocumentRoot /var/www/$host
<Directory /var/www/$host>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Require all granted
</Directory>
SSLEngine on
</VirtualHost>
</Macro>
The other is for Proxy Domains to dockerized stuff:
<Macro ProxyVHost $host $toport>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName $host
ServerAdmin user@example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/$host
<Directory /var/www/$host>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Require all granted
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error-$host.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access-$host.log combined
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [R=301,L]
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:443>
ServerName $host
ServerAdmin user@example.com
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error-$host.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access-$host.log combined
DocumentRoot /var/www/$host
<Directory /var/www/$host>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Require all granted
</Directory>
SSLEngine on
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass "/" "http://127.0.0.1:$toport/" nocanon
ProxyPassReverse "/" "http://127.0.0.1:$toport/"
RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto %{REQUEST_SCHEME}s
RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-For %{REMOTE_ADDR}s
RequestHeader set X-Real-IP %{REMOTE_ADDR}s
AllowEncodedSlashes NoDecode
</VirtualHost>
</Macro>
The actual host definition can then be rather short. A content domain is simply
# echo "Use Vhost contentdomain.koehntopp.de" > /etc/apache2/sites-available/contentdomain.koehntopp.de.conf
# a2ensite contentdomain.koehntopp.de
and I am done. Similarly, a proxy to some internal service:
# echo "Use ProxyVHost proxydomain.koehntopp.de 3000" > /etc/apache2/sites-available/proxydomain.koehntopp.de.conf
# a2ensite proxydomain.koehntopp.de
where 3000 is the exposed port from docker. An apachectl configtest and an apachectl graceful later things are rolling.
A look at /server-status will tell you if things worked, and what the state of the mod_md deployment is.
If you added a new domain, that certificate will be available, but not yet loaded, so a second reload is necessary for deployment.
Find the actual cert files in /etc/apache2/md/domains/mybasedomain.koehntopp.de, as pubcert.pem and privkey.pem.
Additional Note:
You can use mod_md to get certificates for your Tailscale domains (Domains in the *.ts.net namespace).