Automatically create and renew website SSL certificates using the Let’s Encrypt and its client certbot. Nginx server dockerization and crontab configuration.

Docker is a popular open-source containerization platform and it frees your hands to build your applications in development and production. In this post, I’m going to walk you through how to build a production-grade HTTPs secured Nginx server with Docker, Docker Compose, Let’s Encrypt (its client certbot). Let’s Encrypt certificates last 90 days and will need to be renewed after the certificate expires. So I will also provide details to script the renewal in crontab in Docker container.

1. Basic Example

In development, we need a basic Nginx container without HTTPs to fast setup our local test environment. I use Nginx official docker image and wrap up all the stuff with docker-compose.

#docker #ssl #nginx #docker compose #cron #let's encrypt