This week I moved the blog from http to https. The reason - everything is moving to https and maybe it’s good for SEO. There were several steps.

Move from GitHub to VPS

GitHub does not support https for custom domains, BitBucket also. Seems it’s possible with GitLab, but looks to complex. So, finally, I decided to move to VPS, also because I already have one. To do this I:

• changed Makefile to deploy with rsync

publish:
	rm -rf public
	hugo
	rsync -avz --delete public/ user@server:/path/to/blog

• added apache2 conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName blog.sneawo.com

  DocumentRoot /path/to/blog
  <Directory /path/to/blog/>
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
  </Directory>

  ErrorLog ...
  CustomLog ...
</VirtualHost>

• restarted apache service apache2 restart

• removed CNAME record from DNS and added A record to point to the server

• after DNS was updated, removed GitHub repository

Move from http to https

The next task was to generate certificate and enable https. Here are the steps:

• changed the baseurl and the menu links in the blog config to use http instead https

• changed disqus embed code in the theme template

• generated certificate certbot-auto --apache -d blog.sneawo.com certonly

• updated apache2 conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName blog.sneawo.com

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =blog.sneawo.com
  RewriteRule ^ https://blog.sneawo.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,QSA,R=permanent]

  ErrorLog ...
  CustomLog ...
</VirtualHost>


<VirtualHost *:443>
  ServerName blog.sneawo.com

  DocumentRoot /path/to/blog
  <Directory /path/to/blog/>
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
  </Directory>

  ErrorLog ...
  CustomLog ...

  SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/blog.sneawo.com/cert.pem
  SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/blog.sneawo.com/privkey.pem
  Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf
  SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/blog.sneawo.com/chain.pem

</VirtualHost>

• deployed updated version make publish

• restarted apache service apache2 restart

• migrated disqus links with Redirect Crawler in Migration Tools