Over the holidays I converted this site over to use SSL using a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt since the folks at Digital Ocean had written a nice tutorial, How To Secure Apache with Let’s Encrypt on Ubuntu 14.04. The problem was that the installation script partially worked. It created a SSL certificate for multiple hosts but it did not update any of the virtual hosts files. So I had to update the files manually using the template in the /etc/letsencrypt folder. To get an “A” rating from Qualys SSL Server Test I had to download the intermediate certificate https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/. Finally I redirected all of my encrypted traffic to the SSL site. Here is what my Apache host configuration file looks like.
<virtualhost *:80>
ServerName mysite.com
Redirect / https://mysite.com/
</virtualhost>
<virtualhost *:80>
ServerName www.mysite.com
Redirect permanent / http://mysite.com/
</virtualhost>
<virtualhost *:443>
ServerName mysite.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
SSLEngine on
# Intermediate configuration, tweak to your needs
SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3
SSLHonorCipherOrder on
SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES128-GCM-SHA256:kEDH+AESGCM:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:AES:CAMELLIA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXPORT:!DES:!RC4:!MD5:!PSK:!aECDH:!EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:!EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:!KRB5-DES-CBC3-SHA
SSLCompression off
SSLOptions +StrictRequire
SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/fullchain.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/mysite.com/privkey.pem
SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/lets-encrypt-x1-cross-signed.pem
</virtualhost>