mugunthanselvaraj

Posted on Apr 6, 2023 • Updated on Jun 6, 2023

How to create and launch your own secured (HTTPS) web site using AWS EC2, Ubuntu, Nginx, AWS Route 53 and LetsEncrypt?

#aws #ubuntu #nginx #letsencrypt

This post explains how you can register your own domain using AWS Route 53, then hosting your own website using this domain over nginx server on an Ubuntu server and securing it (HTTPS) with LetsEncrypt

Step-1 Get domain name in AWS Route 53

You need your public domain name like google.com or amazon.com in order to make the public users access it. Following steps shows how you can purchase a public domain name in AWS Route 53

In AWS console, search Route 53
Select ‘Register domain’. You can select your domain name with extension based on the availability and your price selection.

Add to cart and add registrant contact details.
Check your contact details. Accept Terms & conditions and complete the order. In some cases you may need to complete the payment through AWS billing so that your domain is enabled and available. Once your have your domain name registered with AWS Route 53, you can continue to use this domain for yourself. You should receive an email to confirm your domain as shown: (this would take some time say 30 min)

Confirm this email to further setup your server for website.

Step-2 Host an EC2 instance in AWS with Ubuntu

Goto AWS EC2.
Click Launch instances.
Give a suitable name for your server

Select ‘Ubuntu’ as application OS image

Choose instance type according to your purpose. Here I am choosing t2.micro

Select ‘Create Key pair’ option and create a new keypair to generate a new permission file (*.pem)

Save this file and it will be available only during creation. Make sure you store it carefully so you don’t lose it.
Edit network settings and provide appropriate values

Under inbound security group rules, add the types HTTP and HTTPS

Configure storage based on your purpose. Here I am leaving it as default 8GB.
Review all and select ‘Launch instance’

Step-3 Attach an elastic IP

Once the instance is successfully launched, go to Network&Security -> Elastic IPs

Select ‘Allocate Elastic IP address’

Add new tag ‘Name’ and provide a reasonable name.

Select ‘Allocate’ button.
Once the elastic ip data is created, use ‘associate this elastic ip address’ button to assign IP to your above created ubuntu server.

Select your server and associate this IP with it

Now you would observe this elastic IP is same as your EC2 instance IP address

Step-4 Install and Nginx

You can now connect to your EC2 instance and setup the website

Use ssh command to connect to your EC2 instance (on windows try using Cygwin or Git Bash
To start with make sure you set your pem file downloaded with read-only permission chmod 400 <path to your pem file>
Connect to your server instance using the ssh command, server name and pem file ssh -i <path to your pem file> ubuntu@your_server_name
Input ‘yes’ to add your finger print
Switch root user (as installations will be done as an root user) sudo su -
Update ubuntu apt update
Install nginx apt install -y nginx
This would install nginx and would have started it in background. You can verify the nginx status by systemctl status nginx

Following are the key locations/files where the configurations and files handled by nginx are located:

view the logs
/var/log/nginx

view the configurations
/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
/etc/nginx/conf.d/

website location
/var/www/html

Test the nginx configuration without loading using the following command nginx -t

Place your website static files in this location /var/www/html. If the location does not exist, create the same. By default nginx creates this location and place a default index file /var/www/html/index.nginx-debian.html
You can verify this by going to a browser and typing the following: (replace the IP address with your EC2 instance public IP address) http://your_public_ip_address

Now we can continue to have our own web page developed and placed in this location: /var/www/html/

Contents of the page:

<head>
    <title>My Own page</title>
</head>
<body>This is my own web page</body>
</html>

Placed in this location on a file /var/www/html/index.html

In order to point nginx to this new index page, open the default configuration of nginx vim /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
Locate the directive index and modify such that our new file is mentioned there, and other file names are removed
Specify the server_name directive with your domain name created above
Test and reload the nginx

nginx -t

systemctl reload nginx

Now if you refresh the URL above in a browser, you should see your own page

Step-5 Test your website with HTTP

Now instead of using the IP address we will map the domain name what we created to this web site
Once you have the domain successfully registered,

Go to ‘Hosted zone’ and select your hosted zone name
Create a new record by specifying your instance public IP address

After the record is created, you can view the status. Make sure that this is in INSYNC
You can verify this domain mapping in Ubuntu using the ‘dig’ command

The same can be verified in windows using ‘nslookup’
Once the above is in place, you now access your website using the domain name what you created http://mugunthanselvaraj.link

Step-6 Securing the website with https using letsencrypt

The current website what we have is http based and is not secured. In order to secure it with SSL/TLS encryption so that it can be accessed over https protocol, we can use letsencrypt to add a SSL certificate to our nginx server.

In order to use certbot (letsencrypt) we need to have snap installed (package manager) in ubuntu. By default this is available. You can verify this by snap version

Verify for latest version apt policy snapd

Download and update it by using the following commands

snap install core; snap refresh core

Remove if you have already have a certbot installed

apt-get remove certbot

Install latest certbot

snap install --classic certbot

Add it to your bin, so that it can be executed using certbot command

ln -s /snap/bin/certbot /usr/bin/certbot

You can verify the cerbot version

certbot --version

Continue to install ssl certificates for your nginx server

certbot -–nginx
This will ask for you email id, in-case you need to be contacted for SSL certificate renewal and notices
Type ‘Y’ for accept terms of service

It would show the available server-names for which the certificate has to be installed for

Just press enter and proceed. This would generate a ssl certificate and configure it in the nginx server.
Now if you access the above website, it would be in https

Finally you have your own website configured in AWS EC2 instance severed through HTTPS protocol.

Step-7 Auto renew certificate:

You can schedule your server to auto renew your SSL/TLS certificate using the following command

certbot renew --dry-run

This would create a timer, which check the SSL certificate expiry periodically and would auto renew it.
You can verify this by the following command and checking the current timers running

systemctl list-timers