Laravel Forge
If you’re a Laravel developer, you’re more than likely familiar with Laravel Forge. Forge allows you to provision a Digital Ocean, Linode or AWS server and deploy your app to it within minutes.
Why do I need an SSL certificate?
There is no excuse to be without an SSL certificate these days. They’re extremely cheap and can even be obtained for free (Let’s Encrypt). This is especially important if you run websites that collect any sort of personal information or provide user logins. From July, Google Chrome will display Not Secure on ALL websites that are not served over HTTPS. This will have a detrimental effect on your customer acquisition if you’ve not migrated over to HTTPS.
Laravel Forge makes is very easy to provision and install SSL certificates by using the integrated Let’s Encrypt service. If you, however, have an SSL certificate that you purchased from another website like GoDaddy, you will need to install this manually. I’ve had a few developers get stuck at this point. Let’s look at getting this done the right way.
Preparations
I will assume you’ve already generated the CSR and Private Key, and purchased and obtained the SSL certificate. The Certificate Authority (CA) usually provides you with two files:
- The actual SSL certificate file;
- An intermediate SSL bundle.
You will need these two files in addition to the Private Key.
Step 1
Within Forge, navigate to your website and click the SSL menu item to the left. Under the options to the right, click on Install Existing Certificate.
Step 2
Paste your Private Key in the designated box. The next step is where many developers stumble. How do you enter the SSL certificate and the bundle into the Certificate box? Easy: first paste the SSL certificate, and immediately below that, paste the bundle.
Step 3
Finally, click Install Certificate and wait for the installation to complete. Once done, you can Activate the new certificate from the list of options.
If you get stuck on any of these steps, please feel free to send me a message!
