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Custom domain and automated encryption (SSL/TLS)

If you have activated the firewall on your service ensure port 80 is open or else certificate creation/renewal will fail

From the service dashboard, click on "Custom Domain Names"  in the overview tab then click on "Manage SSL Domains"

Screenshot 2022-09-29 163437.png

From there you can manage allowed domains for SSL. If you want to add a new domain, just type it and press enter to add it to the list of authorized domains. You will also need to create a DNS entry to point your domain to the IP address of your service.

You can either create an A record or CNAME record to point to your service. CNAME is preferred as it won't change even if your IP change (eg: this can happen if your clone/migrates your service to another provider.

Once added, you can verify if your DNS entry is propagated with a tool like https://dnschecker.org/

Once propagated SSL should work instantly on your service. The certificate will be automatically generated and renewed.


Cloudflare users

If you are using Cloudflare, you should not enable reverse proxy (orange cloud) on your DNS entries, or else it will prevent the SSL certificate creation/renewal process from Elestio with Letsencrypt.

If you still want to use Cloudflare with orange cloud, you should do this to disable elestio SSL for your custom domain:

1) Connect to the VM with SSH and type this:
nano /opt/elestio/nginx/.env

there remove your domain from the first line and save with CTRL+X

then type this command:
cd /opt/elestio/nginx;
docker-compose down;
docker-compose up -d;

after that nginx won't try again to obtain an SSL certificate for your domain and your site will use only the SSL from Cloudflare.


Troubleshooting SSL not generated

You can display the nginx log with this command in a terminal:

cd /opt/elestio/nginx;
docker-compose logs -f;

press ctrl+c to stop displaying the live logs


Reset SSL_DATA folder

In some cases, the /opt/elestio/nginx/ssl_data folder can become corrupted, if this happens, connect to a terminal and try this:

cd /opt/elestio/nginx/;
docker-compose down;
mv ./ssl_data/ ./ssl_data_old/;
mkdir ./ssl_data/;
chmod 777 ./ssl_data/;
docker-compose up -d

Once executed just open your custom website url again and your certificate should be generated and your site served over SSL/TLS.

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