How To Install Let’s Encrypt on Ubuntu 24.04 With Certbot for Apache and Nginx

Installing Let's Encrypt on Ubuntu may sound a bit daunting at first, but it's actually pretty easy! Thanks to Certbot, you can quickly install a Let's Encrypt certificate and use it on your Apache and Nginx web servers to secure traffic with SSL/TLS encryption. In this article, you'll learn how to use the certbot command to install Let's Encrypt on Ubuntu and configure both Apache and Nginx to use HTTPS instead of HTTP.

How to Install Let's Encrypt on Ubuntu

To install Let's Encrypt on Ubuntu with Certbot for Apache and Nginx, first, you'll update your package list. Then, install Certbot and the necessary plugins. Once Certbot is installed, you will use it to generate Let's Encrypt certificate files. Finally, you will set up the certificate in your web server's configuration files.

Prerequisites for Installing Let's Encrypt on Ubuntu

• To follow this tutorial, you'll need an Ubuntu server with sudo privileges. If you haven't noticed, we offer the best priced, most reliable, and fastest Ubuntu servers in the world.

Step 1 - Install Certbot on Ubuntu 24.04

To install certbot and use it with Apache and Nginx on Ubuntu 24.04, first update your package list:

sudo apt update

Use the apt command to install certbot:

sudo apt install -y certbot

This certbot command line tool automates the process of getting and installing a Let's Encrypt certificate valid for 90 days, with the possibility of an automated renewal.

Note

TCP ports 80 (HTTP) & 443 (HTTPS) must be opened on the server firewall for these instructions to work.

Step 2 - Install a Let’s Encrypt Certificate Using Certbot

To create a Let’s Encrypt certificate with certbot on Ubuntu, you’ll use the following command structure:

sudo certbot certonly --webroot --webroot-path WEB_SERVER_ROOT_PATH -m EMAIL -d DOMAIN --agree-tos -n

Here is what each part of the preceding command means:

• certonly: (certificate only) used to just obtain the certificate without installing it anywhere.
• --webroot: An option that is used here to keep the web server running while Certbot runs, since we’re already running a local web server, and don't want to stop it during the certificate issuance process.
• --webroot-path or -w: Defines the top-level directory (“web root”) containing the files served by your webserver. Note that the web root path must be the path on which files from the domain are served. In our example, it's the web root path from which our http://www.example.com URL serves files.
• --mail or -m : The email which will be used by the certificate authority to alert you when a domain will expire.
• --domain or -d: The domain name you’ll use to access the server by.--agree-tos: Confirms our agreement to the ACME server's subscriber agreement.
• --non-interactive or -n is used to execute the command without ever asking for user input or prompts.

Now that you are familiar with the certbot options and actions, you can form and execute a certbot command to create a certificate. For example, you can use the following command, making sure to set the appropriate values for your case:

sudo certbot certonly --webroot --webroot-path /var/www/html/ -m [email protected] -d www.example.com --agree-tos -n

Once the command is executed, the following two files will be