How To Get A Free Wildcard SSL Certificate From Lets Encrypt
One of my favorite services is Let’s Encrypt. They issue free SSL certificates. I have written about how to generate a certificate for a Web Service using their service. They have just started issuing wildcard certificates, and in this blog post I will show you how to make one for an Azure App Service Environment (ASE).
What is a Wild Card SSL Certificate?
In computer networking, a wildcard certificate is a public key certificate which can be used with multiple subdomains of a domain. In easy words, it secures every sub-domain of your domain eg. a wildcard will secure anyname.domain.org documents.domain.org www.domain.org as well as domain.org.
Requirements
- You need a Domain Name to Get a Certificate, Lets Encrypt Certificates are not for IP Addresses.
- Need to access DNS Panel of your Domain.
- Just a little bit of time.
Getting Started
Note: If you are a developer and want to issue a Wildcard Certificate using command lines visit Documentation of Let’s Encrypt.
- Open SSL For Free.
- Creating a Account is Recommend. (Easy Renewals)
- In the blank option enter your domain name like this:
*.hashhackers.com hashhackers.com www.hashhackers.com
Correction Please enter three varients to avoid problems in future as given above.
- Click on Create Free SSL Certificate.
- Click on Manually Verify Domain.
- It will require you to add a DNS TXT record. It’s Easy.
I have hosted my DNS on Cloudflare so opening Cloudflare DNS option.
- Add DNS Record as follows: in host enter _acme-challenge.
- Enter Value from the SSL For Free Website and Save the record.
- Verify the record by clicking on Verify option.
See This
- If matches then Click on Download SSL Certificate.
- Download SSL Files or Just Copy them to use where your domain is hosted.