The reality is that it's quite simple to get up and running.If you've been looking for an easy to read and follow guide that will allow you to dockerize Let's Encrypt on Ubuntu, you've come to the right place. The software that manages this process is called Certbot, and usually, you would install this on your server.Every time you run Certbot, whether it is the first time an SSL/TLS certificate is issued or a certificate renewal, Certbot will perform an ACME challenge request to validate that you are in control of your domain.

In the end, I was never able to find a proper guide and had to resort to figuring it out on my own through trial, error and persistence.This is the guide that I wish was available when I started this journey. docker rm site-a docker rm site-b docker rm nginx-proxy To enable HTTPS via TLS/SSL, your reverse proxy requires cryptographic certificates. Even if you're not interested in running Let's Encrypt in Docker, this post will still show you how to obtain free SSL/TLS certificates from Let's Encrypt as the certificate acquisition steps are the same.I created a Youtube tutorial that shows how to use Docker and Let's Encrypt to issue free SSL certificates. The tooling that Let's Encrypt's Certbot provides is extensive, and the whole experience of using Docker with Let's Encrypt is fantastic.By combining Let's Encrypt with Docker, you get a fully automated environment. Docker + Nginx + Let's Encrypt . It's a basic instance because it doesn't even need to have a default page. With container registry, you build your container images on any machine, and push them to the local Container Registry with the Docker or Podman CLI.

Create a Github Access Token with repo, package write and read permission and enter this token as a password: 16. Step 3 - proxied container(s) If the challenge request is successful, the Certbot agent will install a new SSL/TLS certificate on your server. Therefore, it's always wise to run your commands with a --staging parameter which will allow you to test if your commands will execute properly before running the actual commands.Run the staging command for issuing a new certificate:After executing the above command, you should get the following output which should indicate everything ran successfully.You can also get some additional information about certificates for your domain by running the Certbot certificates command:If the staging command executed successfully, execute the command to return a live certificateAnd then request a production certificate: (note that it's a good idea to supply your email address so that Let's Encrypt can send expiry notifications)If everything ran successfully, run a docker-compose down command to stop the temporary Nginx siteNext, create the Nginx configuration file for the production siteIf you open up a browser and point to http://www.ohhaithere.com, you should see that the site loads correctly and will automatically redirect to https://www.ohhaithere.comEarlier, we placed the following section in the production Nginx configuration file:The production site's docker-compose file then maps a volume into the Nginx container that can be used for challenge requests:This effectively allows Certbot to perform a challenge request. You never have to worry about updating software again or renewing SSL/TLS certificates.

For more ways to install docker, visit the official docker installation page. If you install Certbot on your server, this would involve uninstalling and re-installing Certbot every time you need to update the Certbot agent, which makes it a perfect candidate to run in a Docker container. So if you exceeded 20 requests and are having a problem with generating your certificate for whatever reason, you could run into trouble.

But before we do, you need to be aware that Let's Encrypt has rate limits. It's quite clear why Docker and Let's Encrypt have become so ubiquitous.There's a convergence of different technologies that work together in order to dockerize Let's Encrypt with Ubuntu and Nginx. As stated earlier, it's not necessary to have a default index.html page for this container, but it makes testing the container a lot easier, so I always create one.We're almost ready to execute the Certbot command. SSL/TLS certificates are automatically renewed and software running in Docker containers such as Nginx or the Let's Encrypt Certbot agent are always kept up to date. […] the last post, we used the direct docker –run command but since we’ll be dealing with more than one […]Docker, Nginx and Let’s Encrypt for a secure website