In this tutorial, I would like to demonstrate how to use Letsencrypt ssl for a non standard web ports other than 80, 443 to generate a  SSL certificate for an Apache. If you wish, you can follow same method to implement SSL on other web servers such as nginx  and Tomcat as well. If you are new to Letsencrypt SSL, here is the brief introduction . Letsencrypt is a free, and non-profit CA (certificate authority) which owned by Internet Security  Research Group (ISRG).

please note this is done on Centos 7

01) Install cerbot

first enable the EPEL repository

how to enable EPEL repo on RHEL / Centos read this  and enable EPEL optional channel

then install cerbot using yum as follows

#yum install certbot

02) Install SSL certificate

execute following as root
#certbot certonly –manual  –preferred-challenges dns

This is the most important command, because we generate certificate manually even though cerbot provide Apache plugin. manually generated certificates are flexible so we can integrate it to any preferred web server later 🙂 . preferred-challenges is set to dns, so domain verification is done using  TXT records

After that you will get similar wizard like following image. once you submit the domain. it will give DNS TXT record as challenge
. you must create it before continue. Then after it will generate ssl certificate for your domain.

03) Configure SSL on Apache

you can use following Apache virtual-host config template

04) SSL renewal

you can renew SSL certificate automatically. Add new cron just like following which runs renewal process every week. It’s recommended to reload / restart apache server, so in next line we do restart apache process as well