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Enable SSL with Nginx

Nginx can be used as a load balancer or an SSL termination point for OpenMetadata. In this section, we will look at how to use Nginx and Certbot to deploy SSL. The below instructions are for Ubuntu 20 and any other flavor of Linux please find similar instructions.

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Install Nginx

Nginx can be installed to a completely different host where you are running OpenMetadata Server or on the same host. For simplicity, we will do this on the same host as the OpenMetadata server. 
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx
sudo systemctl start nginx

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Configure Nginx to redirect requests to OpenMetadata

For Nginx to serve this content, it’s necessary to create a server block with the correct directives. Instead of modifying the default configuration file directly, let’s make a new one at /etc/nginx/sites-available/openmetadata: 
sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/openmetadata
And add the below content 
server {
        access_log /var/log/nginx/sandbox-access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/sandbox-error.log;
        server_name sandbox.open-metadata.org;
        location / {
          proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8585;
        }
}
In the above configuration, please ensure that the server_name matches the domain where you are hosting the OpenMetadata server. Also, the proxy_pass configuration should point to the OpenMetadata server port. Then, link the configuration to sites-enabled and restart nginx: 
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/openmetadata /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/openmetadata
sudo systemctl restart nginx
The above configuration will serve at port 80, so if you configured a domain like sandbox.open-metadata.org one can start accessing OpenMetadata server by just pointing the browser to http://sandbox.open-metadata.org.

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Enable SSL using Certbot

Certbot, https://certbot.eff.org/, is a non-profit org that distributes the certified X509 certs and renews them as well. 
sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx
sudo systemctl reload nginx

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Obtaining an SSL Certificate

Certbot provides a variety of ways to obtain SSL certificates through plugins. The Nginx plugin will take care of reconfiguring Nginx and reloading the config whenever necessary. To use this plugin, type the following: 
sudo certbot --nginx -d sandbox.open-metadata.org
Replace sandbox.open-metadata.org with your domain for OpenMetadata. If this is your first time running certbot, you will be prompted to enter an email address and agree to the terms of service. After doing so, certbot will communicate with the Let's Encrypt server, then run a challenge to verify that you control the domain you’re requesting a certificate for. If that’s successful, certbot will ask how you’d like to configure your HTTPS settings.

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Verifying Certbot Auto-Renewal

Let's Encrypt’s certificates are only valid for ninety days. This is to encourage users to automate their certificate renewal process. The certbot package we installed takes care of this for us by adding a systemd timer that will run twice a day and automatically renew any certificate that’s within thirty days of expiration. You can query the status of the timer with systemctl: 
sudo systemctl status certbot.timer
to renew, you can run the following command 
sudo certbot renew --dry-run

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Summary

In this tutorial, we walked through the setup of Nginx to serve the requests to OpenMetadata and used Certbot to enable SSL on Nginx. Do keep in mind that we secured the external connection to Nginx, and Nginx terminates the SSL connections, and the rest of the transport Nginx to the OpenMetadata server is on Plaintext. However, OpenMetadata server should be configured to listen to only localhost requests, i.e., It cannot be reached directly from outside traffic except for Nginx on that host. This makes it a secure SSL.