HTTPS on Acquia stage environments with LetsEncrypt, semi-automated

October 05, 2018

I recently ran into a series of weird issues on my Acquia production environment which I traced back to some code I deployed which depended on my site being served securely using HTTPS.

Acquia Staging environments don’t use HTTPS by default and require you to install SSL certificates using a tedious manual process, which in my opinion is outdated, because competitors such as Platform.sh and Pantheon, Aegir, even Github pages support lots of automation around HTTPS using Let’s Encrypt.

Anyhow, because staging did not have HTTPS, I could not test some code I deployed, which ended up costing me an evening debugging an outage on a production environment. (Any difference between environments will eventually result in an outage.)

I found a great blog post which explains how to set up Let’s Encrypt on Acquia environments, Installing (FREE) Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates on Acquia, by Chris at Redfin solutions, May 2, 2017. Although the process is very well documented, I made some tweaks:

• First, I prefer using Docker-based solutions rather than install softward on my computer. So, instead of install certbot on my Mac, I opted to use the Certbot Docker Image, this has two advantages for me: first, I don’t need to install certbot on every machine I use this script on; and second, I don’t need to worry about updating certbot, as the Docker image is updated automatically. Of course, this does require that you install Docker on your machine.
• Second, I automated everything I could. This result in this gist (a “gist” a basically a single file hosted on Github), a script which you can install locally.

Running the script

When you put the script locally on your computer (I added it to my project code), at, say ./scripts/set-up-letsencrypt-acquia-stage.sh, and run it:

• the first time you run it, it will tell you where to put your environment information (in ./acquia-stage-letsencrypt-environments/environment-my-acquia-project-one.source, ./acquia-stage-letsencrypt-environments/environment-my-acquia-project-two.source, etc.), and what to put in those files.
• the next time you run it, it will automate what it can and tell you exactly what you need to do manually.

I tried this and it works for creating new certs, and should work for renewals as well!