Moving to HTTPS

Well I’ve moved the blogs over to https… it was a bit of a pain and I was really starting to bash my head against the wall with Lets Encrypt’s utilities.

But then I stopped trying to be clever and used

certbot-auto --manual certonly

I then provided a list of the subdomains I wanted to create certificates for and then had to create a response file for each subdomain which was used to validate that I owned the domains.

Once I’d done that and it had created the files I updated my configuration for the blogs and added:

SSLCertificateFile /ewibble/live/blogs.tty.org.uk/cert.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /ewibble/live/blogs.tty.org.uk/privkey.pem
SSLCertificateChainFile /ewibble/live/blogs.tty.org.uk/chain.pem

to the configuration file, and

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

to my .htaccess file

and this to the configuration file for the old non-https site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Then I reloaded my apache config ….

and it all worked!

But of course it didn’t totally work – due to WordPress’s mad idea of embedding internal relative URLs as full urls in some versions of its software.

So I installed the Velvet Blues URL update for Wordress and then spent a happy hour or so going across all the blogs on the site replacing the HTTP based urls for links across the site to HTTPS versions as well

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