SSL certificate for market wordpress site on google vm

Question

it's my first post here and I may be a bit out of my depth so please be patient..

• I am trying to secure my website by adding a ssl certificate.
• The website is a marketplace deployable wordpress multisite hosted on a google VM.
• Because it is a marketplace solution, I didn't had to install Apache or else. In other words, I simply launched the marketplace solution.
• I found that Certbot can certify my website for free.
• I selected Apache as software and Debian 9 as system on that page: https://certbot.eff.org/instructions
• I followed the instruction and inputted the lines in Google ssh.
• When I type: sudo certbot renew --dry-run I get Congratulations, all simulated renewals succeeded.
• Still following the instruction I enter https://example.com and it tell me the connection is not secure.

Do you guys, know what I am doing wrong?

Thanks in advance..

Answer 1

So, I'm not 100% sure on Google VM itself, but the line you used:

sudo certbot renew --dry-run 

is a dry run renewal - this is a test to make sure your configuration is correct but won't actually create or renew any certificates. Because there is a limit to how many certificates your can attempt to generate per hour, you would use this dry run first to ensure your configuration is correct, before you do the real one.

You should be able to generate your certificates on the command line like so:

sudo certbot --apache

This should generate the certificate (it will ask you some questions first) and update the web server to automatically point your site to SSL, however if this does not work you can also do this manually.

This command:

sudo certbot certonly --apache

will generate the certificates, but it will be up to you to update your configuration to point your site to the secure version.