Manage Letsenrypt HTTPS/SSL certificates with a Docker container using Cron, Nginx, and Certbot Modern websites must have HTTPS support for security reasons. As a result web browsers and search engines have begun downgrading sites that do not support HTTPS. That means we all must have a simple, low cost, way to set up HTTPS support on our websites. The Letsencrypt project offers free SSL certificates for HTTPS. In this project we will create a Docker container for handling HTTPS via Nginx, and automated SSL certificate renewal using the Letsencrypt command-line tools (Certbot).

Using NGINX, Lets Encrypt and Cron in Docker to manage HTTPS/SSL certificates for multiple domains NGINX is a hugely flexible webserver with which it's very easy to manage HTTPS with Lets Encrypt. With a simple configuration file it is easy to add HTTPS support to a back-end service, using NGINX's reverse proxy. It's possible to use this for deployments both small and large. As with any website Internet-visible nowadays, it is necessary to use HTTPS. Which leads to the task of using Lets Encrypt to provision SSL certificates for several domains, using NGINX to terminate the HTTPS connections, while proxying from NGINX to the actual services. This blog post discusses a Docker container designed explicitly for that purpose.