Kevin Reid's blog

In further news of updating my personal web presence, I have finally set up HTTPS for switchb.org. As I write this I'm working on updating all the links to it that I control.

The thing I found underdocumented in Let's Encrypt/Certbot is: if you want to (or must) manually edit the HTTP configuration, what should the edits be? What I concluded was:

<VirtualHost *:443>
  ServerName YOUR DOMAIN NAME
  Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf
  SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/YOUR DOMAIN OR CERT NAME/cert.pem
  SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/YOUR DOMAIN OR CERT NAME/privkey.pem
  SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/YOUR DOMAIN OR CERT NAME/chain.pem

  ...rest of configuration for this virtual host...
</VirtualHost>

Notes:

• /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf (which of course may be in a different location depending on your OS and package manager) contains the basic configuration to enable SSL (SSLEngine on) and certbot-recommended cipher options.
• You have to have a separate VirtualHost entry for *:443 and *:80; there's no way to copy the common configuration as far as I heard.
• By "CERT NAME" I mean the name assigned to a multi-domain-name certificate if you have requested one. You can find out the certificate names with the command certbot certificates. For a single domain it will be identical to the domain name.

Never need to run a text editor as root: use sudo -e.

A data: URL directly contains its content; for example, data:text/plain,Hello%20World!. The main usefulness of this is that you can do things like including images inline in a document. But you can also use it to create 'anonymous' HTML documents, where any link to them or bookmark contains the entire document.

I originally did this in 2006 when I was in need of a URL-encoding tool and did not have one to hand; so I wrote out:

data:text/html,<form action="data:text/plain,"><input id=r>

Properly encoded, that's:

data:text/html,%3Cform%20action=%22data:text/plain,%22%3E%3Cinput%20name=r%3E

This produces a form with a single field which, when submitted, will generate a data URL for a plain text document containing “?r=” and then the text; the URL, then, will contain the entered text URL-encoded after the “?r=”.

Of course, that's a horrible kludge and JavaScript has an encodeURI function...

See my site for the rest of that thought and more examples. (I can't include any actual data URLs in this post because LiveJournal doesn't permit them, for necessary but unfortunate reasons — the origin, in the sense of same-origin policy, of a data URL is the origin of the page containing it.)