Tag: SSL

Setting up a Cloudflare SSL certificate for Bitnami WordPress on Google Cloud Compute Engine

Bitnami WordPress on Google Cloud Compute Engine does not out of the box ship with SSL turned on, site owners need to secure communication to and from their website using SSL.

Here’s how to configure SSL using a free Cloudflare SSL certificate for Bitnami WordPress on Google Cloud Compute Engine.

Creating certificate files with Cloudflare

First we generate and download the SSL certificate files from Cloudflare.

    1. Open up your site profile on Cloudflare.com
    2. Switch to the Crypto tab
    3. Within the Origin Certificates section click the Create Certificate button
    4. Ensure the Let Cloudflare generate a private key and a CSR option is set to RSA
    5. Click Next
    6. With the Key format field set to PEM (Default) highlight and paste the contents of the Origin Certificate and Private Key blocks into separate new files on your Desktop:
      • Origin Certificate: server.crt
      • Private Key: server.key

Configuring Apache on your WordPress Bitnami instance

  1. Now we connect with SSH to the hosting server; your Google Cloud Compute Engine instance. You can do this via the Google Cloud Platform > Compute Engine > VM Instances > Connect with SSH or with your preferred terminal client.
    1. Open an SSH session to your Google Cloud Compute Engine instance
    2. Navigate to the /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/ directory with the following terminal command: 
       cd /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/
    3. Delete or rename the existing server.crt and server.key files in this directory (I prefer to rename them to server.crt_legacy and server.key_legacy): 
       sudo mv server.crt server.crt_legacy

 sudo mv server.key server.key_legacy
    4. Create two new files in their place: 
       sudo touch server.crt

 sudo touch server.key
    5. With your preferred terminal text editor paste the contents of the two Cloudflare certificate files mentioned above into these new files on your hosting server 
       sudo nano server.crt

 sudo nano server.key
    6. Restart the Apache service 
      sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

Enable SSL within Cloudflare

  1. Open up your site profile on Cloudflare.com
  2. Switch to the Crypto tab
  3. Change the SSL dropdown from Flexible to Full
  4. Change the Always use HTTPS option to On
  5. Change the Automatic HTTPS Rewrites option to On

That’s it!