Raspberry Pi ideas

Setting up a free CA signed SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt for my LEMP server on my Raspberry Pi 3 with an Ubuntu Server 15.10.3 image to secure my WordPress site

After setting up a LEMP web server on Raspberry Pi 3 with an Ubuntu Server 15.10.3 image to host my new WordPress website, a good colleague of mine recommended me to try implementing a free certified SSL certificate. The intelligent and generous folks from Let’s Encrypt had created a free and open Certificate Authority and an automated workflow for websites to generate certified SSL certificates for serving trusted and encrypted communication.

Since, there is no cost involved in implementing the SSL certificate, I went on to try and implement one on the Nginx server on my Raspberry Pi 3.

This post documents my process on setting up a Let’s Encrypt certified SSL certificate for my Nginx server on my Raspberry Pi 3.

Adding swap space for my Ubuntu Server 15.10.3 image running on my Raspberry Pi 3

A swap space. also known as virtual memory, is a dedicated area on a writable medium that acts like the RAM for Linux processes to remember things while they are running. For laptop and desktop computers, that writable medium is usually a hard disk. For my Raspberry Pi 3, it is the microSD card which I had written my Ubuntu 15.10.3 image on.

While running the Let’s Encrypt application to set up a free CA signed SSL certificate for my LEMP server on my Raspberry Pi 3 to secure connections to my WordPress site, the Let’s Encrypt application hanged while it was trying to install the Python dependencies that it needed. This prompted me to turn to swap space for increasing the total memory that processes on my Ubuntu 15.10.3 image can utilize.

This post documents the steps that I took to add some swap space on my Ubuntu 15.10.3 image running on my Raspberry Pi 3 so that processes can use more than 1GB of memory.

How I resized the file system of my Ubuntu Server 15.10.3 image to utilize the entire microSD card space on my Raspberry Pi 3

After setting up a LEMP web server on Raspberry Pi 3 with an Ubuntu Server 15.10.3 image to host my new WordPress website, I decided to create some swap space to complement the 1GB ram on my Raspberry Pi 3 in running more services.

When I tried to create a 4GB swap file, the fallocate command complained that there was no space left on my Raspberry Pi 3:

Setting up a LEMP web server on Raspberry Pi 3 with an Ubuntu Server 15.10.3 image to host a WordPress website

I was trying to start a new WordPress site. Before hosting it on a Digital Ocean droplet, I decided to incubate the WordPress site on a Raspberry Pi 3 to clock some content. This post documents the steps that I took to set up a LEMP web server on Raspberry Pi 3 with an Ubuntu server 15.10.3 image to host a new WordPress site.