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HTTPS Certificates

HTTPS certificates are very easy to deal with if you use the yourclient1.yourapp.com, yourclient2.yourapp.com model. You can use a wildcard HTTPS certificate.

If you use the model where second level domains are used, there are multiple ways you can solve this.

This guide focuses on nginx.

1. Use nginx with the lua module

Specifically, you're interested in the ssl_certificate_by_lua_block directive. Nginx doesn't support using variables such as the hostname in the ssl_certificate directive, which is why the lua module is needed.

This approach lets you use one server block for all tenants.

2. Add a simple server block for each tenant

You can store most of your config in a file, such as /etc/nginx/includes/tenant, and include this file into tenant server blocks.

server {
  include includes/tenant;
  server_name foo.bar;
  # ssl_certificate /etc/foo/...;
}

Generating certificates

You can generate a certificate using certbot. If you use the --nginx flag, you will need to run certbot as root. If you use the --webroot flag, you only need the user that runs it to have write access to the webroot directory (or perhaps webroot/.well-known is enough) and some certbot files (you can specify these using --work-dir, --config-dir and --logs-dir).

Creating this config dynamically from PHP is not easy, but is probably feasible. Giving www-data write access to /etc/nginx/sites-available/tenants.conf should work.

However, you still need to reload nginx configuration to apply the changes to configuration. This is problematic and I'm not sure if there is a simple and secure way to do this from PHP.