Question
Enabling HTTPS access to Droplet
- Posted on March 28, 2023
- DigitalOcean Droplets
Asked by Billy @ Generative Labs
What I want to do Expose an Flask API via Droplet over HTTPS.
What I’ve done
- I’ve got the Flask API up and running via Droplet over HTTP (not HTTPS)
- I’ve configured a certificate using Let’s Encrypt (I manage the domain using Digital Ocean)
Questions
- In the Digital Ocean UI, it says “Certificates can be used for secure traffic forwarding with load balancers, and spaces CDNs.” – Does this mean these certs can’t be used for other purposes as well (i.e. configuring HTTPS)?
- Can I access the cert files created via Let’s Encrypt somewhere?
Thank you in advance.
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Hello @billygenerativelabs
You can secure the traffic with the Let’s Encrypt’s SSL Certificate with no issues, usually, this is what they’re mostly used for in general.
The certificate files should be stored in
/etc/letsencrypt/and you can inspect them at any time.You can also set up a cronjob to auto-renew the certificate.
Regards
Thank you both.
@Richard: Yes, I noticed the documentation indicated that certificates can be used with load balancers, easy enough, but given that I’m not using a load balancer at this point (as the traffic doesn’t warrant it), I was looking to know if I could use those same certificates to secure an HTTP server directly.
@KFSys: Interesting, I will look. I ended up running CERTBOT directly on the Droplet server, mounted the directory containing the cert into my container, and then referenced them in Dockerfile’s Gunicorn run command. It ended up working great, but was a little more work than expected.
I have services running the way you describe:
(Want more help? Just ask.)