Install SSL certificate manually on serverpilot

Answering here in case others are searching for a solution:

ServerPilot uses Nginx as the public facing web server and proxies the requests to Apache. So, we have to add our SSL configuration to Nginx.

Steps:

Login to the server using SSH

Create a directory to hold the certificate and key files.

cd /home
mkdir -p certs/domain_name

Copy the certificate (.crt) and private (.key) files to this directory. Replace domain_name with your domain name.

Add custom SSL configuration here:

cd /etc/nginx-sp/vhosts.d
nano APP_NAME.ssl.conf

Replace APP_NAME with your actual app name (website). Put this inside the file APP_NAME.ssl.conf:

###############################################################################
# Install SSL Certificate
###############################################################################

server {
    listen       443 ssl;
    listen       [::]:443 ssl;
    server_name
        www.DOMAIN.com
        DOMAIN.com
      ;

    ssl_certificate /home/certs/domain_name/certificate_file.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /home/certs/domain_name/privatekey_file.key;

    root   /srv/users/serverpilot/apps/APP_NAME/public;

    access_log  /srv/users/serverpilot/log/APP_NAME/APP_NAME_nginx.access.log  main;
    error_log  /srv/users/serverpilot/log/APP_NAME/APP_NAME_nginx.error.log;

    proxy_set_header    Host              $host;
    proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP         $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-For   $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

    include /etc/nginx-sp/vhosts.d/APP_NAME.d/*.nonssl_conf;
    include /etc/nginx-sp/vhosts.d/APP_NAME.d/*.conf;
}

As usual, replace APP_NAME, domain_name, certificate_file and privatekey_file with your own values.

Restart Nginx

service nginx-sp restart

That’s it. The SSL certificate is installed.

I recently wrote a detailed tutorial for it… The actual SSL installation and configuration on ServerPilot will take less than 10 minutes. You can check it out over here:

https://www.blogmehow.com/how-to-manually-install-ssl-on-serverpilot-free-plan-1331/

Let me know if it helps…

NikhilSharma thanks heaps!!

Here’s the final .ssl.conf file with the changes incorporated from the comments above.

server {
listen 443 ssl;
listen [::]:443 ssl;
server_name
www.DOMAIN.com
DOMAIN.com
;

ssl on;

ssl_certificate /home/certs/domain_name/certificate_file.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /home/certs/domain_name/privatekey_file.key;

root   /srv/users/serverpilot/apps/APP_NAME/public;

access_log  /srv/users/serverpilot/log/APP_NAME/APP_NAME_nginx.access.log  main;
error_log  /srv/users/serverpilot/log/APP_NAME/APP_NAME_nginx.error.log;

proxy_set_header    Host              $host;
proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP         $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-For   $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-SSL on;
proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

include /etc/nginx-sp/vhosts.d/APP_NAME.d/*.nonssl_conf;
include /etc/nginx-sp/vhosts.d/APP_NAME.d/*.conf;
}

Make sure you replace APP_NAME, domain_name, certificate_file and privatekey_file with your own values.

If your paths are incorrect you will either get an error when your restart Nginx or a 403 error when you visit your website.

Restart Nginx

service nginx-sp restart