Spent a couple hours trying to obtain an SSL certificate to encrypt my site last night... No luck so far. It kept saying it doesn't have access, when I verified that nginx serves to port 443...

While unfamiliar with nginx. Did you check your firewall. Just a friendly reminder. I forget at least once every 5 times I create a new vm

@RexOmni I use Linux, so should that even be a problem?

@kyleperik yes...

@FitzSuperUser crap

@kyleperik yep. If It's your first time you may want to check your router as well

That and the certificate authority your using is well known if it ain't... Then it won't work anyway

@RexOmni okay, thanks. I've been serving for a while HTTP. But I know that the future is encrypted so I'm just working through it.

@kyleperik no worries! :) Googles war against HTTP screwed me over a little bit. But open SSL is a lifesaver

Try letsencrypt, just to try and see if ssl works. They give copy and paste commands to use so it's super easy

Here's the page for nginx on Ubuntu 16.10

https://certbot.eff.org//...

@ScribeOfGoD that's what I'm using... It just says it won't connect

@kyleperik works for me with apache no problem

@kyleperik what won't connect Javascripts, the browser, letsencrypt, or the database?

@ScribeOfGoD @RexOmni well I use Ubuntu 16.04, so I followed the instructions. I made sure port forwarding was setup and even got my webpage to load. Though when I ran that command to get a certificate and it says it won't connect.

Sorry, don't mean to turn this into a forum haha

@kyleperik heh. we're all in tech support here!
Good luck!

@kyleperik how are you doing the verification? I usually use manual verification because it's quite easy to do because then your webserver just needs to server on http .well-known/acme-challenge/..... and then it will verify you have access to domain. Subsequently you can upload your certs to the webserver and update nginx accordingly. Also make sure you upload your private key and cert in the right format AND I also advise you to include the full chain as well

@liammartens I just used the standalone. I didn't quite understand what that webroot method all involved

@kyleperik no I mean you should try --manual

Did nginx bind to the right address?
Did you check the local firewall: iptables?
Where are you deployed? Router? NAT? Network firewall?
Can you ping the machine?

@liammartens Thank you! That's what did it. Either the documentation is hard to read or I'm just lazy,

@kyleperik well --manual isn't actually in the docs or very hidden I believe but it works for me 😄 glad I could help