Setting up Let's Encrypt with Hugo

I finally got around to setting up HTTPS with a free TLS certificate for the blog. As I've mentioned before I mostly use Windows as my daily driver and love using WSL for a native bash/linux experience. Of course this isn't flawless and sometimes this rears its ugly head. In particular Let's Encrypts' tool letsencrypt-auto won't work under WSL. It seems to be due to a python package trying to execute code on the stack, which is a security vulnerability that WSL disallows, according to this github issue.

I ended up creating a simple virtual machine with Vagrant in order to run let's encrypt and get a certificate generated. It actually took me longer than I originally expected, given that there are quite a few articles on setting this up. I followed this article that talks specifically about GitLab, where this blog is hosted. It, however, deals with Jekyll and not Hugo, and it took a few extra non-obvious steps to get things working.

Once you run letsencrypt-auto certonly --manual -d <domain name>, it expects you to setup a page with a token to verify that you are the owner of the domain. I ended up creating a new section by creating a folder under content called 'letsencrypt' and placed a single article 'token.md' under it. In that file I placed the following:

+++
url = "<url that letsencrypt-auto is going to look for>"
layout = "rawtext"
+++
<token that letsencrypt-auto wants to find>

I then created a layouts/letsencrypt/rawtext.html file in the base of my blog project with the following

{{ .Plain }}

The last step, which took me longer than it should have, was to turn off auto-lower casing of urls in site wide config (config.toml):

...
disablePathToLower = true
...

With that I was able to generate the certificates that I needed and setup the domain information on Gitlab.