How to dynamically set SSL certificate for Nginx web server for staging/testing environment

If you are configuring CI/CD, there is a high chance that you want to dynamically set certificates for different subdomains on testing or staging server. This is pretty straightforward process and requires little setup to work properly.

Prerequisites

We will assume that

• Server uses Nginx 1.15.9 or higher;
• Branches are deployed to /var/www/subdomains/$branch;
• Domain for server is staging.com;
• Each branch can be accessed via https://${branch}.staging.com, and their subdomains via https://${subdomain}.${branch}.staging.com;
• Server has OpenSSL 1.0.2 or higher installed;
• Certificates are issued with certbot for ${branch}.staging.org and ${subdomain}.${branch}.staging.com;
• staging.confis an entry point for all our deploymentsis and is in Nginx’s sites-enabled directory.

Setting up .conf file

To set SSL certificate for connection, we use two directives:

server {
    #...
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/certificate/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/certificate/privkey.pem;
    #...
}

Since specified in prerequisites Nginx and OpenSSL versions are supporting variables for those directives, we just need to extract our branch + domain name. We can do this with simple regular expression in map before server directive:

map $ssl_server_name $certname {
    default $ssl_server_name;
    ~^(subdomain1.|subdomain2.)?(((?<branch>(?!subdomain1|subdomain2).+).|)staging.com)$ $2;
}

You can thorougly study this regular expression on regex101.com. What this snippet does is basically extracting “branch + staging.com” string to $certname variable. We can then use this variable for our SSL certificates:

server {
    #...
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/$certname/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/$certname/privkey.pem;
    #...
}

Why you can’t just use $ssl_server_name

You actually can, this is an example of advanced setup for staging/testing evnironment with multiple deployments and multiple subdomains for each deployment. You can read more in Managing SSL certificates for Nginx web server for staging/testing environment article.