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Proxying Fossil via HTTPS with nginx
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Proxying Fossil via HTTPS with nginx

One of the many ways to provide TLS-encrypted HTTP access (a.k.a. HTTPS) to Fossil is to run it behind a web proxy that supports TLS. This document explains how to use the powerful nginx web server to do that.

This document is an extension of the Serving via nginx on Debian document. Please read that first, then come back here to extend its configuration with TLS.

Install Certbot

The nginx-on-Debian document had you install a few non-default packages to the system, but there’s one more you need for this guide:

   $ sudo apt install certbot

You can extend this guide to other operating systems by following the instructions found via the front Certbot web page instead, telling it what OS and web stack you’re using. Chances are good that they’ve got a good guide for you already.

Configuring Let’s Encrypt, the Easy Way

If your web serving needs are simple, Certbot can configure nginx for you and keep its certificates up to date. Simply follow Certbot’s nginx on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS guide. We’d recommend one small change: to use the version of Certbot in the Ubuntu package repository rather than download it from the Certbot site.

You should be able to use the nginx configuration given in our Serving via nginx on Debian guide with little to no change. The main thing to watch out for is that the TCP port number in the nginx configuration needs to match the value you gave when starting Fossil. If you followed that guide’s advice, it will be 9000. Another option is to use the fslsrv script, in which case the TCP port number will be 12345 or higher.

Configuring Let’s Encrypt, the Hard Way

If you’re finding that you can’t get certificates to be issued or renewed using the Easy Way instructions, the problem is usually that your nginx configuration is too complicated for Certbot’s --nginx plugin to understand. It attempts to rewrite your nginx configuration files on the fly to achieve the renewal, and if it doesn’t put its directives in the right locations, the domain verification can fail.

Let’s Encrypt uses the Automated Certificate Management Environment protocol (ACME) to determine whether a given client actually has control over the domain(s) for which it wants a certificate minted. Let’s Encrypt will not blithely let you mint certificates for google.com and paypal.com just because you ask for it!

Your author’s configuration, glossed in the HTTP-only guide, is complicated enough that the current version of Certbot (0.28 at the time of this writing) can’t cope with it. That’s the primary motivation for me to write this guide: I’m addressing the “me” years hence who needs to upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04 LTS and has forgotten all of this stuff. 😉

Step 1: Shifting into Manual

The first thing to do is to turn off all of the Certbot automation, because it’ll only get in our way. First, disable the Certbot package’s automatic background updater:

  $ sudo systemctl disable certbot.timer

Next, edit /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/example.com.conf to disable the nginx plugins. You’re looking for two lines setting the “install” and “auth” plugins to “nginx”. You can comment them out or remove them entirely.

Step 2: Configuring nginx

This is a straightforward extension to the HTTP-only configuration:

  server {
      server_name .foo.net;

      include local/tls-common;

      charset utf-8;

      access_log /var/log/nginx/foo.net-https-access.log;
       error_log /var/log/nginx/foo.net-https-error.log;

      # Bypass Fossil for the static Doxygen docs
      location /doc/html {
          root /var/www/foo.net;

          location ~* \.(html|ico|css|js|gif|jpg|png)$ {
              expires 7d;
              add_header Vary Accept-Encoding;
              access_log off;
          }
      }

      # Redirect everything else to the Fossil instance
      location / {
          include scgi_params;
          scgi_pass 127.0.0.1:12345;
          scgi_param HTTPS "on";
          scgi_param SCRIPT_NAME "";
      }
  }
  server {
      server_name .foo.net;
      root /var/www/foo.net;
      include local/http-certbot-only;
      access_log /var/log/nginx/foo.net-http-access.log;
       error_log /var/log/nginx/foo.net-http-error.log;
  }

One big difference between this and the HTTP-only case is that we need two server { } blocks: one for HTTPS service, and one for HTTP-only service.

HTTP over TLS (HTTPS) Service

The first server { } block includes this file, local/tls-common:

  listen 443 ssl;

  ssl_certificate     /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;

  ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem;

  ssl_stapling on;
  ssl_stapling_verify on;

  ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
  ssl_ciphers "ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256”;
  ssl_session_cache shared:le_nginx_SSL:1m;
  ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
  ssl_session_timeout 1440m;

These are the common TLS configuration parameters used by all domains hosted by this server.

The first line tells nginx to accept TLS-encrypted HTTP connections on the standard HTTPS port. It is the same as listen 443; ssl on; in older versions of nginx.

Since all of those domains share a single TLS certificate, we reference the same example.com/*.pem files written out by Certbot with the ssl_certificate* lines.

The ssl_dhparam directive isn’t strictly required, but without it, the server becomes vulnerable to the Logjam attack because some of the cryptography steps are precomputed, making the attacker’s job much easier. The parameter file this directive references should be generated automatically by the Let’s Encrypt package upon installation, making those parameters unique to your server and thus unguessable. If the file doesn’t exist on your system, you can create it manually, so:

  $ sudo openssl dhparam -out /etc/letsencrypt/dhparams.pem 2048

Beware, this can take a long time. On a shared Linux host I tried it on running OpenSSL 1.1.0g, it took about 21 seconds, but on a fast, idle iMac running LibreSSL 2.6.5, it took 8 minutes and 4 seconds!

The next section is also optional. It enables OCSP stapling, a protocol that improves the speed and security of the TLS connection negotiation.

The next section containing the ssl_protocols and ssl_ciphers lines restricts the TLS implementation to only those protocols and ciphers that are currently believed to be safe and secure. This section is the one most prone to bit-rot: as new attacks on TLS and its associated technologies are discovered, this configuration is likely to need to change. Even if we fully succeed in keeping this document up-to-date, the nature of this guide is to recommend static configurations for your server. You will have to keep an eye on this sort of thing and evolve your local configuration as the world changes around it.

Running a TLS certificate checker against your site occasionally is a good idea. The most thorough service I’m aware of is the Qualys SSL Labs Test, which gives the site I’m basing this guide on an “A” rating at the time of this writing. The long ssl_ciphers line above is based on their advice: the default nginx configuration tells OpenSSL to use whatever ciphersuites it considers “high security,” but some of those have come to be considered “weak” in the time between that judgement and the time of this writing. By explicitly giving the list of ciphersuites we want OpenSSL to use within nginx, we can remove those that become considered weak in the future.

There are a few things you can do to get an even better grade, such as to enable HSTS, which prevents a particular variety of man in the middle attack where our HTTP-to-HTTPS permanent redirect is intercepted, allowing the attacker to prevent the automatic upgrade of the connection to a secure TLS-encrypted one. I didn’t enable that in the configuration above, because it is something a site administrator should enable only after the configuration is tested and stable, and then only after due consideration. There are ways to lock your users out of your site by jumping to HSTS hastily. When you’re ready, there are guides you can follow elsewhere online.

HTTP-Only Service

While we’d prefer not to offer HTTP service at all, we need to do so for two reasons:

So, from the second service { } block, we include this file to set up the minimal HTTP service we require, local/http-certbot-only:

  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;

  # This is expressed as a rewrite rule instead of an "if" because
  # http://wiki.nginx.org/IfIsEvil
  #rewrite ^(/.well-known/acme-challenge/.*) $1 break;

  # Force everything else to HTTPS with a permanent redirect.
  #return 301 https://$host$request_uri;

As written above, this configuration does nothing other than to tell nginx that it’s allowed to serve content via HTTP on port 80 as well. We’ll uncomment the rewrite and return directives below, when we’re ready to begin testing.

Notice that this configuration is very different from that in the HTTP-only nginx on Debian guide. Most of that guide’s nginx directives moved up into the TLS server { } block, because we eventually want this site to be as close to HTTPS-only as we can get it.

Step 3: Dry Run

We want to first request a dry run, because Let’s Encrypt puts some rather low limits on how often you’re allowed to request an actual certificate. You want to be sure everything’s working before you do that. You’ll run a command something like this:

  $ sudo certbot certonly --webroot --dry-run \
     --webroot-path /var/www/example.com \
         -d example.com -d www.example.com \
         -d example.net -d www.example.net \
     --webroot-path /var/www/foo.net \
         -d foo.net -d www.foo.net

There are two key options here.

First, we’re telling Certbot to use its --webroot plugin instead of the automated --nginx plugin. With this plugin, Certbot writes the ACME HTTP-01 challenge files to the static web document root directory behind each domain. For this example, we’ve got two web roots, one of which holds documents for two different second-level domains (example.com and example.net) with www at the third level being optional. This is a common sort of configuration these days, but you needn’t feel that you must slavishly imitate it; the other web root is for an entirely different domain, also with www being optional. Since all of these domains are served by a single nginx instance, we need to give all of this in a single command, because we want to mint a single certificate that authenticates all of these domains.

The second key option is --dry-run, which tells Certbot not to do anything permanent. We’re just seeing if everything works as expected, at this point.

Troubleshooting the Dry Run

If that didn’t work, try creating a manual test:

  $ mkdir -p /var/www/example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge
  $ echo hi > /var/www/example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/test

Then try to pull that file over HTTP — not HTTPS! — as http://example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/test. I’ve found that using Firefox or Safari is better for this sort of thing than Chrome, because Chrome is more aggressive about automatically forwarding URLs to HTTPS even if you requested “http”.

In extremis, you can do the test manually:

  $ telnet foo.net 80
  GET /.well-known/acme-challenge/test HTTP/1.1
  Host: example.com

  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Server: nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)
  Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2019 19:43:58 GMT
  Content-Type: application/octet-stream
  Content-Length: 3
  Last-Modified: Sat, 19 Jan 2019 18:21:54 GMT
  Connection: keep-alive
  ETag: "5c436ac2-4"
  Accept-Ranges: bytes

  hi

You type the first two lines at the remote system, plus the doubled “Enter” to create the blank line, and you get something back that hopefully looks like the rest of the text above.

The key bits you’re looking for here are the “hi” line at the end — the document content you created above — and the “200 OK” response code. If you get a 404 or other error response, you need to look into your web server logs to find out what’s going wrong.

Note that it’s important to do this test with HTTP/1.1 when debugging a name-based virtual hosting configuration like this. Unless you test only with the primary domain name alias for the server, this test will fail. Using the example configuration above, you can only use the easier-to-type HTTP/1.0 protocol to test the foo.net alias.

If you’re still running into trouble, the log file written by Certbot can be helpful. It tells you where it’s writing it early in each run.

Step 4: Getting Your First Certificate

Once the dry run is working, you can drop the --dry-run option and re-run the long command above. (The one with all the --webroot* flags.) This should now succeed, and it will save all of those flag values to your Let’s Encrypt configuration file, so you don’t need to keep giving them.

Step 5: Test It

Edit the local/http-certbot-only file and uncomment the redirect and return directives, then restart your nginx server and make sure it now forces everything to HTTPS like it should:

  $ sudo systemctl restart nginx

Test ideas:

This forced redirect is why we don’t need the Fossil Admin → Access "Redirect to HTTPS on the Login page" setting to be enabled. Not only is it unnecessary with this HTTPS redirect at the front-end proxy level, it would actually cause an infinite redirect loop if enabled.

Step 6: Re-Point Fossil at Your Repositories

As of Fossil 2.9, the permanent HTTP-to-HTTPS redirect we enabled above causes Fossil to remember the new URL automatically the first time it’s redirected to it. All you need to do to switch your syncs to HTTPS is:

  $ cd ~/path/to/checkout
  $ fossil sync

Step 7: Renewing Automatically

Now that the configuration is solid, you can renew the LE cert with the certbot command from above without the --dry-run flag plus a restart of nginx:

  sudo certbot certonly --webroot \
     --webroot-path /var/www/example.com \
         -d example.com -d www.example.com \
         -d example.net -d www.example.net \
     --webroot-path /var/www/foo.net \
         -d foo.net -d www.foo.net
  sudo systemctl restart nginx

I put those commands in a script in the PATH, then arrange to call that periodically. Let’s Encrypt doesn’t let you renew the certificate very often unless forced, and when forced there’s a maximum renewal counter. Nevertheless, some people recommend running this daily and just letting it fail until the server lets you renew. Others arrange to run it no more often than it’s known to work without complaint. Suit yourself.

Document Evolution

Large parts of this article have been rewritten several times now due to shifting technology in the TLS and proxying spheres.

There is no particularly good reason to expect that this sort of thing will not continue to happen, so we consider this to be a living document. If you do not have commit access on the fossil-scm.org repository to update this document as the world changes around it, you can discuss this document on the forum. This document’s author keeps an eye on the forum and expects to keep this document updated with ideas that appear in that thread.