Self-hosting a minimal website with nginx and HTTPS

This website is now self-hosted on a Raspberry Pi server at home. I had struggled with nginx and HTTPS in the past, so was rather pleasantly surprised to see how straightforward it was.

I couldn't find anything on the web that walked one through the whole process, so here are the steps that I took, in some order. (This isn't meant to be a full tutorial, sorry.)

The site now serves static content using Pelican. Much nicer than WordPress. More on Pelican in a future post, but for now let us take it for granted that we just want to serve static files in /home/jmft2/jmft.dev/public_html.

DNS and firewall

• Add a suitable DNS record to your home network. I use No-IP and then use an ALIAS record.
• Set up port forwarding on ports 80 and 443 on your firewall (in your router settings).

Setting up nginx

• Install nginx:

sudo apt install nginx

• Create a minimal config file at ~/jmft.dev/nginx_config:

server {
    server_name jmft.dev;

    access_log /home/jmft2/jmft.dev/logs/nginx-access.log;
    error_log /home/jmft2/jmft.dev/logs/nginx-error.log;

    location / {
        alias /home/jmft2/jmft.dev/public_html/;
        index index.html;
    }
}

• Make the directory for logs:

mkdir ~/jmft.dev/logs

• Make symlinks to the sites-available and sites-enabled directories in /etc/nginx:

sudo ln -s ~/jmft.dev/nginx_config /etc/nginx/sites-available/jmft.dev
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/jmft.dev /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/jmft.dev

• Make sure the public_html directory and all its parents are readable by the www-data user. One way is this:

chmod a+rX ~ ~/jmft.dev ~/jmft.dev/public_html

• Check the configuration, and if it is successful, load it:

sudo nginx -t && sudo systemctl reload nginx

At this point, going to http://jmft.dev (no https) should show you the index.html page for the site.

Setting up HTTPS

LetsEncrypt recommend using Certbot, which made the HTTPS installation process very straightforward.

• Certbot is managed by the Snap package manager, so it is first necessary to install that:

sudo apt install snapd
sudo systemctl restart snapd  # might be needed
sudo snap install core
sudo snap install --classic certbot

• Run Certbot and follow the instructions:

sudo certbox --nginx

• Reload the new nginx configurations:

sudo systemctl reload nginx

With this set up, going to https://jmft.dev should bring the site up.