The first step to using Let’s Encrypt to obtain an SSL certificate is to install the Certbot software on your server.

Install Certbot and it’s Nginx plugin with apt:

sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx

Certbot provides a variety of ways to obtain SSL certificates through plugins. The Nginx plugin will take care of reconfiguring Nginx and reloading the config whenever necessary. To use this plugin, type the following:

sudo certbot --nginx -d example.com -d www.example.com

This runs certbot with the --nginx plugin, using -d to specify the domain names we’d like the certificate to be valid for.

If this is your first time running certbot, you will be prompted to enter an email address and agree to the terms of service. After doing so, certbot will communicate with the Let’s Encrypt server, then run a challenge to verify that you control the domain you’re requesting a certificate for.

If that’s successful, certbot will ask how you’d like to configure your HTTPS settings.

Let’s Encrypt’s certificates are only valid for ninety days. This is to encourage users to automate their certificate renewal process. The certbot package we installed takes care of this for us by adding a systemd timer that will run twice a day and automatically renew any certificate that’s within thirty days of expiration.

You can query the status of the timer with systemctl:

sudo systemctl status certbot.timer

Output
● certbot.timer - Run certbot twice daily
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/certbot.timer; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (waiting) since Mon 2020-05-04 20:04:36 UTC; 2 weeks 1 days ago
    Trigger: Thu 2020-05-21 05:22:32 UTC; 9h left
   Triggers: ● certbot.service

To test the renewal process, you can do a dry run with certbot:

sudo certbot renew --dry-run