HTTPS-Deployment-Without-Custom-Domain-Name

This shows how to secure your websites with HTTPS without buying domain name and certificates.

HTTPS without purchasing domain name

The recommended way of securing your website is by using SSL or TLS certificates installed on your website. Most certificate authorities require you to have a custom domain name. However, it is possible to use just your instance IPaddress but it is not encouraged for so many reasons and its also quite complicated to achieve.

Here i will show a simple way of achieving this without a custom domain name by using nip.io as a DNS and caddy as a reverse proxy.

Steps

1. Create an EC2 instance with with inbound rules to 443 (https port) and 8000 (website port)

   

2. Create a simple index.html with "Hello World" as its content.

3. Serve the html page on port with this:

       python3 -m http.server 8000

   

   you will notice it is not secure. Let's fix this and enable SSL on this server.

4. Now install candy on the server. Instructions can be found here. Caddy 2 is a powerful open source web server with automatic HTTPS. Caddy simplifies your infrastructure and takes care of TLS certificate renewals.

5. Next we'll create a file named Caddyfile with the following contents.

   

   Here, we are using nip.io as a DNS. nip.io allows you to map any IP Address to a hostname without the need to edit a hosts file or create rules in DNS management. Remeber to replace with your ip address and the port number.

6. Save the file and run the command sudo caddy start. This runs it in the background.

   

   This will start Caddy certificate management service and download a certificate for the indentifier

7. Now you can see the site is secure