Yesterday, I purchased a new domain from Namecheap and realized there were a bunch of things to do to make the new webpage live. Here I listed some notes for future reference.
Setup HTTPS
For certain domain suffixes, HTTPS is compulsory. For instance, .dev is a secure namespace and the website requires HTTPS to work in browser.
- Generate a new cert using certbot
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# for example, your domain is domain.com
sudo certbot --nginx -d domain.com -d www.doamin.com
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If you see Error getting validation data, means the DNS settings have not take effect.
It says it may take up to 48 hours to finish the propagation, but in my case, it only delayed about 3 minutes.
- Add domains to an existing cert
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nginx -s stop
certbot certonly --standalone -d domain.com -d www.domain.com -d abc.domain.com --expand
nginx
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Remember to stop Nginx, otherwise, the following message will be shown.
Problem binding to port 80: Could not bind to IPv4 or IPv6.
The genenrated cert files will be put at /etc/letsencrypt/live/domain.com/
Since we already have the certs for https, we can redirect all http requests to https. Besides, we also redirect URLs with www to non-www, to make the URL cleaner as well as provide the only enter point for users, so that search engines can index the single URL for the website.
If you are wondering in what situations we should use www, please refer to this article.
Redirect http to https, and www to non-www:
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server {
listen 80;
server_name domain.com www.domain.com;
return 301 https://domain.com$request_uri;
}
server {
listen 443 ssl;
server_name www.domain.com;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/domain.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/domain.com/privkey.pem;
include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf;
ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem;
return 301 https://domain.com$request_uri;
}
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Then the main server block:
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server {
listen 443 ssl;
server_name domain.com;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/domain.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/domain.com/privkey.pem;
ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
ssl_ciphers 'EECDH+AESGCM:EDH+AESGCM:AES256+EECDH:AES256+EDH';
root /var/www/home;
error_page 404 =404 /404.html;
# Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html /index$uri /index$uri/ =404;
}
}
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Check Redirection
The following Python programs checks if the https and subdomain redirections are correct.
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import requests
hosts = [
#(host_name, subdomains)
('yjlo.xyz', ['page']),
('runtime.xyz', []),
]
def check_url(domain, sub=None):
sub_domains = ['', 'www.']
if sub:
for s in sub:
sub_domains.append(s + '.')
failed_urls = []
for schema in ['http', 'https']:
for sub_domain in sub_domains:
url = '{}://{}{}'.format(schema, sub_domain, domain)
try:
r = requests.get(url)
status = r.status_code
label = ' ' if status == 200 else '*'
print('{}[{}] {}'.format(label, status, url))
except Exception as e:
print('*[err] {} {}'.format(url, e))
failed_urls.append(url)
return failed_urls
if __name__ == '__main__':
error_urls = []
for d, s in hosts:
error_urls.extend(check_url(d, s))
if error_urls:
print('\n===== [Failed URLs] =====')
for eus in error_urls:
print(eus)
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