Securing an Azure App Service Website under SSL in minutes with Let's Encrypt - Scott Hanselman's Blog

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2021-05-28 19:00:09

Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority. That means you can get free SSL certs and change your sites from http:// to https://. What's the catch? The SSL Certificates only last 90 days - not a year or years. They do this to encourage automation. If you set this up, you'll want to have some scripts or background process to automatically renew and install the certificates.

I run nearly two dozen websites (some small, some significant) on Azure. Given that Chrome 68+ is going to call out non HTTPS sites explicitly as "Not secure" in July, now's as good a time as any for us to get our sites - large and small - encrypted. I have some small static "brochure-ware" sites like http://babysmash.com that just aren't worth the money for a cert. Now it's free, so let's do it.

In some theorectical future, I hope that Azure and Clouds like it will have a single "encrypt it" button and handle the details for us, but as of the date of this blog post, there's some manual initial setup and some great work from the community.