How we configured Elastic Beanstalk to play nicely with automatic certificate renewal by Let’s Encrypt. Everyone it seems is going with Let’s Encrypt to generate their free SSL/TLS ceritficate. Running it once is easy, but getting it configured to work with Elastic Beanstalk and EC2’s lifecycle can send you round in circles. This post is an update of the original January 2017 post with our improved configuration. The configuration needs to cater for ALL of these scenarios: ... Read more

How we created a static website with Hugo and hosted it on GitLab Pages with our custom domain secured with a SSL/TLS certificate, for free. With Hugo + GitLab Pages + Let’s Encryptyou get: Static website generator. Auto-deploy on checkin. Free hosting. Custom domain AND secured with SSL/TLS encryption. Free Let’s Encrypt certificate. Previously we had [setup our website on GitHub] (/post/hugo-website-on-githubpages/) but with one major drawback: Github Pages doesn’t currently support SSL/TLS certificates with a custom domain. ... Read more

When you are looking to reduce your AWS costs, you might consider removing the Load balancer. At $20 per month it accounts for a large proportion of the hosting costs for a small application. Is it really needed right now? Down the line when your application grows, you can easily bring it back - right? Elastic beanstalk is handy for provisioning and deployment, and thankfully the load balancer is not compulsory. ... Read more

Switching your Rails site to always use HTTPS takes a bit configuring. Here is how we followed AWS’s 3 high level steps: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/ssl-server-cert.html Create a custom domain with your DNS provider. Create and upload an SSL certificate to AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM). Update your Elastic Beanstalk environment to use HTTPS. Step 1) was DONE - We already had our own www.ourdomain.com, not registered on AWS route 53 nor using the AWS route 53 name servers, but with godaddy. ... Read more