
Using Let’s Encrypt with Apache httpd on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
Getting an SSL certificate for your web server has traditionally been a something of an effort. You need to correctly generate a weird thing called a certificate signing request (CSR), submit it to the web page of your chosen Certificate Authority (CA), wait for them to sign and generate a certificate, work out where to put the certificate to configure it for your web server—making sure you also configure any required intermediate CA certificates—and then restart the web server. If you got all that right, you then need to enter a calendar entry so you’ll remember to go through the process again in (say) a year’s time. Even some of the biggest names in IT can mess up this process.
With new CAs like Let’s Encrypt, along with some supporting software, the rigmarole around SSL certificates becomes a thing of the past. The technology behind this revolution is Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME), a new IETF standard (RFC 8555) client/server protocol which allows TLS certificates to be automatically obtained, deployed, and renewed. In this protocol, an “agent” running on the server that needs an SSL certificate will talk to to the CA’s ACME server over HTTP.
A popular method for using ACME on your Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 server is certbot. Certbot is a standalone ACME agent that is configured out-of-the-box to work with Let’s Encrypt and can work with Apache httpd, Nginx, and a wide variety of other web (and non-web!) servers. The certbot authors have an excellent guide describing how to set up certbot with httpd on RHEL7.
In this tutorial, I’ll show an alternative method—the mod_md module—which is an ACME agent implemented as a module for Apache httpd, tightly integrated with mod_ssl, and is supported today in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. The mod_md module was implemented by Stefan Eissing—a prolific developer who also added HTTP/2 support to httpd—and contributed to the Apache Software Foundation, becoming a standard part of any new installation since httpd version 2.4.30.
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