Free SSL for your remote website with Certbot

Cristian Popescu — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:03:50 +0000

To get your website on the right path, you must have a professional look and inspire trust. What is a better way to do that other than get a certificate to attest that you are who you are telling everyone you are?
After you have this, your customers will be able to trust that they are barking at the right tree, so to speak, especially if you sell dog food, or cats 🐱, from a tree.
Not to bore you with any more details... here is how I managed to generate my SSL certificate for free with Certbot and Let's Encrypt, having only FTP access to a cPanel hosting platform, like most of basic hosting providers offer.

Walkthrough

Step 1 - Installing Certbot

extracted from here
Adding Certbot install source

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
    sudo add-apt-repository universe
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
    sudo apt-get update

Actually install Certbot

sudo apt-get install certbot

Step 2 - Start process

Trigger the process for obtaining a certificate

sudo certbot certonly --manual

You will be asked some questions that will help the process like domain name, and confirmation that your IP can be logged and stored.
In the end you will get this:

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Create a file containing just this data:

3somCsUrL5gqQ1dpEZH-cdunbOh0s4EopDqeAL8bGEQ.ZBWPX1wW-bZycJUQEVL0PxqWb7WbBG0XdbWHQqgERwA

And make it available on your web server at this URL:

http://test.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/3somCsUrL5gqQ1dpEZH-cdunbOh0s4EopDqeAL8bGEQ

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Leave this console as it is, until you are done with the next steps.

Step 3 - Create the file locally

echo "3somCsUrL5gqQ1dpEZH-cdunbOh0s4EopDqeAL8bGEQ.ZBWPX1wW-bZycJUQEVL0PxqWb7WbBG0XdbWHQqgERwA" >> 3somCsUrL5gqQ1dpEZH-cdunbOh0s4EopDqeAL8bGEQ

This will create the required folder on your local machine

Step 4 - Create the required directory tree and copy the file up to the FTP server

As in the above example, you need to create the structure of urls that are requested. So login via FTP and create everything:

ftp ftp.test.com
// use your credentials that you were provided with from your hosting provider
// create if not present the .well-known folder
mkd .well-known
// change directory
cd .well-known
//create the acme-challange folder
// IMPORTANT: copy the text from the link in the console
// I ran into multiple issues by writing the folder name myself
mkd acme-challange
// change directory
cd acme-challange
// upload file
put 3somCsUrL5gqQ1dpEZH-cdunbOh0s4EopDqeAL8bGEQ
// exit ftp
bye

You can now go back to your previous console and hit ENTER, so you can finish up with the process.

Step 5 - You are done... almost

After successfully finishing up the process, you will be provided with the path of the generated certificates and keys, something starting with cd /etc/letsencrypt/live/. Go there by switching to the super user on your local machine.

sudo su
cd /etc/letsencrypt/live/

Go into your cPanel and find SSL/TLS shortcut and manage your certificates. Select your domain and fill up the required form with CRT (cert.pem) and KEY (privkey.pem).
Now you can click Install certificate and...

Your're DONE! Congrats!

Important Note

I. Keep in mind the acme-challange folder name, it must be copied from the console since it has unusual characters encoding, which fails the test of Certbot.
II. Having the most basic plan, I do not have SSH access to my remote host, so I can only access it via FTP. If SSH was present, this thing would be much easier by installing certbot on the server machine.
III. Do not forget to add a permanent redirect from the root to your brand new https:// domain.

Thanks for reading.

Kotlin and it's extenstions

Cristian Popescu — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 05:02:13 +0000

Here are a few of my favourite shortcuts to work with Kotlin. If you have others, don't hesitate to mention them.

1. chunked doc

Works on Iterables that are most common to us, like Lists or Sequences.
It does exactly what it sounds like, splits a collection in equal parts (if possible) and enables us to transform each resulting sublist, all in the same operation.

val initialList = listOf("chair", "table", "couch")
val chunkedTwo = initialList.chunked(2)
// chunkedTwo -> [["chair", "table"], ["couch"]]
val transform = initialList.chunked(2) { subList -> subList.last() }
// transform -> ["table", "couch"]

You may have needed this or not, but it's nice to know it's there. Sometimes when you think about it, it's not that difficult to do, but reimplementing the same things may cause you to slip up somewhere, somehow.

2. with doc

Scoped functions like with enable us to write more verbose code. This one can cut down on the length of the line by scoping to a nested variable in your object. But I think an example is most fit here.

data class Birthday(val year: Int, val month: Int, val day: Int)
data class Person(val name: String, val birthday: BirthDay)
data class Employee(val position: String, val person: Person)

// having a method that receives an employee and computes a string
fun nameAndBirth(employee: Employee) = with(employee.person.birthday) {
    // in here, the scope is actually Birthday
    "${employee.person.name}: $day/$month/$year"
  }
}

Another cool fact about with is that, like the other functions run, let and so on, it will return the last value that was computed. In our case, the String that contains the name and birth of the employee.

3. associateBy doc

This is a great shortcut to create maps for objects that you need to find later on, by certain keys (id, name, length and so on). You could find it really useful, since this, in many cases is repeatable.

data class Room(val id: Long, val name: String, val area: Double)

val rooms = listOf(Room(1, "living", 40.5), Room(2, "living", 39.3))
val associated = rooms.associateBy { it.name }
// associated -> { "living"=Room(2, "living", 39.3)}
val associated2 = rooms.associateBy { it.id }
// associated2 -> { 1=Room(1, "living", 40.5), 2=Room(2, "living", 39.3)}

Be careful since if two keys match, only the last one will be present in the resulted map.

Hope you can try these out if you didn't already.

Thanks for Reading

DEV Community: Cristian Popescu