Generate a Let’s Encrypt Certificate for Silo with Certbot

Let’s Encrypt is a new free, automated, and open source, Certificate Authority.

Certbot is a console based certificate generation tool for Let’s Encrypt.

In this recipe, we will generate a Let’s Encypt certificate using Certbot. This certificate will then be deployed for use in the MinIO server.

1. Prerequisites

• Install MinIO Server using the Red Hat Linux deployment guide.
• Install Certbot from the Certbot website.

2. Dependencies

• Port 443 for https needs to be open and available at time of executing certbot.
• Certbot needs root access while executing because only root is allowed to bind to any port below 1024.
• We will be using our own domain myminio.com as an example in this recipe. Replace with your own domain under your setup.

3. Recipe Steps

Step 1: Install Certbot

Install Certbot by following the documentation at https://certbot.eff.org/.

Step 2: Generate Let’s Encrypt cert

# certbot certonly --standalone -d myminio.com --staple-ocsp -m test@yourdomain.io --agree-tos

Step 3: Verify Certificates

List your certs saved in /etc/letsencrypt/live/myminio.com directory.

$ ls -l /etc/letsencrypt/live/myminio.com
total 4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  37 Aug  2 09:58 cert.pem -> ../../archive/myminio.com/cert4.pem
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  38 Aug  2 09:58 chain.pem -> ../../archive/myminio.com/chain4.pem
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  42 Aug  2 09:58 fullchain.pem -> ../../archive/myminio.com/fullchain4.pem
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  40 Aug  2 09:58 privkey.pem -> ../../archive/myminio.com/privkey4.pem
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 543 May 10 22:07 README

Step 4: Set up SSL on MinIO Server with the certificates.

The certificate and key generated via Certbot needs to be placed inside user’s home directory.

$ cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/myminio.com/fullchain.pem /home/user/.minio/certs/public.crt
$ cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/myminio.com/privkey.pem /home/user/.minio/certs/private.key

Step 5: Change ownership of certificates.

$ sudo chown user:user /home/user/.minio/certs/private.key
$ sudo chown user:user /home/user/.minio/certs/public.crt

Step 6: Start MinIO Server using HTTPS.

If you are not going to run MinIO with root privileges, you will need to give MinIO the capability of listening on ports less than 1024 using the following command:

sudo setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' ./minio

Now, you can start MinIO Server on port “443”.

$ ./minio server --address ":443" /mnt/data

If you are using dockerized version of MinIO then you would need to

$ sudo docker run -p 443:443 -v /home/user/.minio:/root/.minio/ -v /home/user/data:/data minio/minio server --address ":443" /data

Step 7: Visit https://myminio.com in the browser.