Conversion from HTTP to HTTPS using Boulder

Please fill out the fields below so we can help you better. Note: you must provide your domain name to get help. Domain names for issued certificates are all made public in Certificate Transparency logs (e.g. https://crt.sh/?q=example.com), so withholding your domain name here does not increase secrecy, but only makes it harder for us to provide help.

My domain is: localhost

I ran this command: ```
ifconfig docker0 | grep “inet addr:” | cut -d: -f2 | awk ‘{ print $1}’


It produced this output:
none

My web server is (include version): apache2

The operating system my web server runs on is (include version): kali 

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: no

I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don't know): yes

I'm using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel): no

The version of my client is (e.g. output of `certbot --version` or `certbot-auto --version` if you're using Certbot): certbot 0.36.0



PROBLEM:  i want to turn my http local website into https using boulder.

i have followed each and every steps provided in the link below
https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder

what to do next ?

Hi @babar404

that's a curious idea.

If you use an own boulder instance, the certificate isn't trusted, so you have to create an exception in your browser.

So you can create a self signed certificate, use that and create the exception. The result is the same.

If you want to secure localhost (i.e. https://localhost) in a way that will be trusted by your browser, use mkcert. It is built exactly for this scenario. I use it all the time, it’s very easy and works great.

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i want to do it using boulder

i want a certificate on my localhost website using boulder. kindly provide me with any help soo i can convert my local website into https (self signed certificate)

Unless you are doing this for the educational experience, Boulder does not help you at all.

3 Likes

yes i wanna do it for educational experience. my aim is to do this ASAP

What is the problem you’re encountering? You’ve followed the development setup and then the working with Certbot steps? What error message are you stuck on?

can you provide me with some proper steps to follow? my apache server is running on localhost i just want to encrypt with letsencrypt’s open source service using boulder

The steps to follow are the ones I linked to in the README:

If you aren’t able to follow these instructions I don’t think Boulder is going to be useful for you.

Is this for a school assignment by any chance?

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Hi @babar404,

Fortunately Let’s Encrypt offers a service that runs Boulder for you, so all you need to do is connect to that service using Certbot. I recommend following the steps at https://certbot.eff.org/.

2 Likes

Per @cpu’s and @jsha’s suggestions, setting up your own Boulder is pretty much never helpful unless

  • you are an IT administrator of a large organization and you want to create your own internal certification infrastructure, or
  • you are personally helping to develop some of the software tools behind Let’s Encrypt itself, or
  • you are doing an educational project such as a school project to learn how this process works.

In the last case, this is potentially a very big project and is probably not a good one to take on first prior to getting experience with other system administration or devops projects.

Otherwise, Let’s Encrypt does have a great free certificate service that you can use for any project that needs publicly-trusted certificates, without setting up your own copy of Boulder. :slight_smile:

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