Install Let’s Encrypt SSL on CentOS 7 Running Apache Web Server

Introduction

This document will list on how to install Let’s Encrypt SSL on CentOS 7 Running Apache Web Server

PS : Please replace example.com with your valid domain name which is mapped with your server

We will install following dependencies in order to make Let’s Encrypt SSL work:

• epel-release
• mod_ssl
• python-certbot-apache

Installing dependent modules

yum install epel-release mod_ssl

Downloading the Let’s Encrypt client

yum install python-certbot-apache

Setting up the SSL certificate

Certbot will handle the SSL certificate management quite easily, it will generate a new certificate for provided domain as a parameter.

In this case, example.com will be used as the domain for which the certificate will be issued:

certbot --apache -d example.com

If you want to generate SSL for multiple domains or subdomains, please run this command:

certbot --apache -d example.com -d www.example.com

PS : IMPORTANT! The first domain should be your base domain, in this sample it’s example.com

Setting up auto renewal of the certificate

Create new cron job for automatic renewal

This job can be safely scheduled to run every Monday at midnight:

crontab -e
 
0 0 * * 1 /usr/bin/certbot renew >> /var/log/sslrenew.log