Multidomain webroot for Letsencrypt with NGINX

If you have web server on which there is a lot of virtual hosts, you may want to have one webroot directory for Letsencrypt SSL certificates only. So when Letsencrypt will make the requests for SSL registration or renewal, it will look in this directory. In this case I did this on CentOS 7 with NGINX web server.

First, let’s create directory what will be used for letsencrypt purposes. It must be writable by your web server user. You can define different path.

[root@machine ~]# mkdir -p /var/www/le-certs
[root@machine ~]# chown -R wwwuser:wwwgroup /var/www/le-certs

Letsencrypt will need access in “.well-known/acme-challenge”. For NGINX add something like this in your server block for desired virtual host.

location ~ /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
             root /var/www/le-certs/;
             break;
}

You can also create new file named, for example le-config.conf and add block above in to it. Then you can simply include this line in your virtual hosts. 

server {
             listen :443 ssl http2;
             server_name mywebsite.com www.mywebsite.com;
             root /var/www/mywebsite/;

             include le-config.conf;
              ...
}

 

 

WordPress bruteforce protection with NGINX and limit_req / request limitation

WordPress installations are very common targets of brute force attacks. With this attacks, attacker tries countless username and password variations in order to guess login informations. As you can imagine that such abusive behavior on your WordPress can cause collapse of server. Very common are attacks on wp-login.php and xmlrpc.php. There is a simple way to limit allowed number of requests on specific file with limit_req. This module can limit processing rate of requests coming from a single IP address on your web server.

In order to protect your WordPress administration you can do something like this:

# prevent brute force attacks on wp-login.php
 location = /wp-login.php {
        limit_req zone=one burst=5 nodelay;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
 }

This will allow 5 request in 5 second “window”. When there’ll be more than 5 request in 5 seconds, Nginx will return 503 error until request rate slows down:

$ curl -I https://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-login.php 
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
Server: nginx

Of course, you can use limit_req to protect other systems besides WordPress to.

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