Domains of backend APIs and SSL

Contact info

Yueteng | yh958@cornell.edu

Root domain

Root domain is: diaper.cf

Registered as a free domain (renewable every 12 months) at https://www.freenom.com/

User account login info (email, password) are the same as gmail/github/etc

Current registration expires on 2021-12-05 (December 5th) (Must renew at the above website before expiration)

Domains to use

For API callers (i.e. frontend web/app)

Choose the domain accordingly, prepend it with http or https, and append it with port number and path.

e.g. https://on-prod.diaper.cf:5001/api/version

SSL Certificate for https

The free SSL cert from Let's Encrypt is used for this purpose.

Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/

Tutorial for creating SSL cert

[Tutorial: Configure SSL/TLS on Amazon Linux 2 - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud]

(https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/SSL-on-amazon-linux-2.html#letsencrypt)

On section "Certificate automation: Let’s Encrypt with Certbot on Amazon Linux 2", Use this to instal `certauto`, but not to create

Stop after done `sudo yum install -y certbot python2-certbot-apache`

[Generate Wildcard SSL certificate using Let’s Encrypt/Certbot | by Saurabh Palande | Medium]

(https://medium.com/@saurabh6790/generate-wildcard-ssl-certificate-using-lets-encrypt-certbot-273e432794d7)
Start at Step 3. Replace `./certbot-auto` with `sudo certbot`
Use this to run command to create
Note: There can be multiple domains in command, e.g. `-d yueteng.me -d *.yueteng.me`
Note: (The order is important) First deploy DNS TXT record under the prompted domain, pause for 5 minutes for it to activate, use the website below to verify it’s been activated (mind the value must be correct) then hit continue (otherwise will fail)
Note: If you include multiple domains, you will be required to enter multiple DNS TXT records
[DNS Lookup Text Record - MxToolbox](https://mxtoolbox.com/TXTLookup.aspx)

Command line to use

sudo certbot certonly --manual --preferred-challenges=dns --email diapertestemail@gmail.com --server https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory --agree-tos -d diaper.cf -d *.diaper.cf

Cert information

Upon success, you'll see some information similar to below

Press Enter to Continue
Waiting for verification...
Cleaning up challenges
Subscribe to the EFF mailing list (email: diapertestemail@gmail.com).

IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/diaper.cf/fullchain.pem
   Your key file has been saved at:
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/diaper.cf/privkey.pem
   Your cert will expire on 2021-03-05. To obtain a new or tweaked
   version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot
   again. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run
   "certbot renew"

Copy cert files to somewhere docker can access and give permission

Create a cert folder under project path, and copy both .pem files into the folder. Then change the permissions by:

sudo chown ec2-user:ec2user ./certs/*

This will allow flask and docker to access the cert files.

Specify which yml file to use when launching docker on production (and test) environment

A separate docker-compose config file named docker-compose-prod.yml is created.

Since only production (and test) environment will use this cert. When launching docker, must specify this yml file.

Command Line

docker-compose -f docker-compose-prod.yml up -d