I have a web project I am building for fun. It is react, express, mongodb
I currently have an aws domain we will call foo.com that my react app is linked to. I am using S3 and cloudfront to route foo.com as my react app sitting in S3.
I created an SSL cert for foo.com.
That all works
Now on an EC2 instance I have a Express.js app that I am using as a rest server. So my react app uses my elastic ip to call using REST on my EC2 instance.
Since I added SSL to my react app it now will not allow non SSL calls into my api so I am trying to fix that.
I setup an ELB and used my foo.com cert (Mistake?) pointing at my EC2 and opened port 80 and 443 via security group, all works. Except my cert is for foo.com. and my backend server is just setup to use elastic up. Or I guess now the load balancer URL. So I get an invalid certificate name error if I try to load the URL to my express app via the load balancer URL.
How do I use SSL to have my react app make http calls to my express backend. Do I create a new cert? The cert seems to want a DNS name like foo.com but my backend server is just an elastic ip.
Not really sure how to tie all this together I think I am 90% where I need to be.?
Need to get my react app on S3 with a cert and DNS name foo.com to talk to my rest server (express) on EC2 instance using just elastic IP? or Load Balancer URL? What do I do for a cert for that?
You need to add the cert to the load balancer, and point a domain at the load balancer. Something like api.foo.com. You do this by creating a CNAME record in your DNS provider, that points to the load balancer's DNS name. Then have your React app make calls to your API at that domain name. You can create the certs for free in AWS Certificate Manager that will attach to an ELB.
The cert you add to the load balancer will either need to be for api.foo.com or *.foo.com.
Related
I have deployed my frontend in S3 bucket. backend is on EBS. bucket is secured with https but backend api's are not so frontend is not able to connect with the api's. i wanted to add HTTPS for the api's on EBS. i have generated Certificate for the domain name also. i have created a load balancer for the ec2 where my api's are deployed but still i'm not able to connect with it. i have set the Security groups groups also which routes the traffic from port 80 to 443. i don't know where i'm doing wrong or which step i'm missing.
Need help to know the full process and how this all mess is connected with each other.
I set up an Application Load Balancer(AWS) for my website. In my website, I have angular as my frontend, and I have NodeJs and Neptune DB as my backend.
Browser(Local Machine) -> ALB -> EC2 Instance(Web).
I have an url for my web(https://example.com), so when I made a request to https://example.com in my local machine browser, Angular will do a api call using httpclient.get() to fetch data from nodejs at https://example.com/api/ticket.
So my question is when Angular fetch data from NodeJS, will the api call bypass the ALB, what is the host then? Or NodeJs will recognize the request is from the local?
I assume you are using an ALB with Host based routing. In this case you can have a 443 rule for example.com forwarding requests to the EC2 instance. Then in the Nodejs application you can have that api called using the same url.
This means that the request will be routed through the ALB which is also the best practise to do the same.
I hava a Nodejs/Express application running on AWS. My public URL (www.example.com) is registered in a host provider (SiteGround).
My host provider DNS entry for the application points to AWS (application.example.com points to my AWS public IP).
My host provider has also our company web site running WordPress.
So, if you point to our public URL you get our website. Pointing to the application you get our SaaS login page.
All of that runs fine with HTTP. I have now a task to migrate everything to HTTPS. I've checked how to add HTTPS to nodejs, all fine.
My question is related to certificates. Questions:
a) Should I get the SSL certificate on my host company or on AWS? Both offers the certificates.
b) Do I need a certificate on AWS (to be added to nodejs) and at my domain (to allow HTTPS domain access) or just in nodejs ?
It does not matter from where you get your certificate as long as your provider gives you an authorized certificate. However, if you use Amazon's certificate manager, it can be be easier to integrate with their services.
If you are serving your application through AWS load balancer then you don't need to add it to the Node.js application, instead you get a certificate through the certificate manager and add it to the listening interface in the load balancer, it gets served automatically this way.
Create a Classic Load Balancer with an HTTPS Listener
HTTPS Listeners for Your Application Load Balancer
If you are serving your application directly, then you will need to add it to the Node.js application (e.g. using https module).
I'll try to answer each question below:
a) Should I get the SSL certificate on my host company or on AWS? Both
offers the certificates.
If the Amazon issued certificate is strong enough for your needs, like basic https encryption, I would opt to use them for the sake of simplicity. You just need to fill the form, validate and Amazon is in charge of making it secure and renew it automatically when it expires.
b) Do I need a certificate on AWS (to be added to nodejs) and at my
domain (to allow HTTPS domain access) or just in nodejs ?
AWS issued certificates can only be used with AWS managed services such as Application Load Balancer and CloudFront - CDN. There are many docs explaining about how to setup an ELB with AWS Certificate and EC2 Backend, check Create a Classic Load Balancer with an HTTPS Listener
In order to use them inside your EC2 vm you would need to download and configure it in your webserver. I think AWS will never allow it to avoid security breaches.
It doesn't matter how you will get a certificate. You can request free certificates with Letsencrypt using API, you can create certificates in AWS Load Balancer (but don't forget to check if AWS certificate limitations are fine for your case)
AWS LoadBalancer will be in front of your EC2 so it will sign certificates for you.
If you have an option to get certificate files (e.g. you create certificates yourself by using letsencrypt or other cert provider), you should keep certificates on your EC2 instance (if you have multiple instances, you should keep certificates on each instance). And you should use Network Load Balancer on tcp level, so NLB will just proxy your traffic which was already signed correctly.
Also you can use existing third-party solutions from AWS marketplace or non-AWS solutions. E.g. you can use AWS Kilo SLL. It is easy to setup, it will create and renew certificates for your domains. So you will have just an extra EC2 isntance which will sign all your traffic depending on the request domain. Mostly sure there are other alternatives similar solution to use, for our 240 domains Kilo works fine
I use netlify.com for the front-end (React.js) which automatically comes with https, but it's not allowing me to make https requests to the express server as my express server does not have a cert.
How do I get a cert for my express server (which serves only RESTFUL APIs) with AWS Certificate Manager? It's asking for domain name but all I have is a static IP for the AWS EC2 instance.
If AWS Certificate Manager is not suitable for this case, what's the easiest free way to get a cert and set it up for the Express server? I'm running the Express server directly via node, without apache/nginx.
You will have to point a domain name to the REST API server. You can't request an SSL certificate for an IP address. Do you not own a domain name that is pointing to your React app already? You should setup a subdomain like api.example.com that points to your API server, and then request an Amazon SSL certificate for that subdomain.
Note, you must be using an Elastic Load Balancer or CloudFront to use an Amazon Certificate Manager SSL certificate. You can't install it directly on an EC2 instance.
I'm quite new to this. I have a node-express https server that currently runs locally on my machine. My simple website runs on this https sever and make xmlhttp requests to consume some APIs (as these APIs only accept requests from https endpoint). At the moment I'm using a self signed SSL certificate.
I'd like to deploy the server with html, js files to EC2 and make it accessible to the public. My questions are
Can I use AWS Certificate Manager to generate a SSL certificate, and how to use it with node-express server? Can node-express use this SSL certificate on EC2? or do I need to use this SSL certificate with Elastic Beanstalk and ELB?
I did some research but the ACM documentation said an email will be sent to the registered domain owner for each domain name in the certificate request. I don't have a domain as I plan to have users access my site using IP address. What do I do in this case?
Many thanks for your help!
You can't use an ACM certificate directly with NodeJS. You have to place a load balancer in front of your server and install the ACM certificate on the load balancer.
The ACM service does not support SSL certificates for IP addresses, only domain names. I recommend obtaining a domain name.