HTTPS

By default, BSIS will provide a link with http, however, for accessing the link securely, https is usually recommendded. N

Https is a protocol that encrypts your communication with a web server. Https can be useful for two things:

So nobody can read the communication between you and the web server

So you can be sure that you are really really talking to the desired web server, and not to a fake (a so-called man-in-the-middle)

There are two ways to produce a link with https

Inside server

When a shiny server is set up, by default a http link is given. In order to upgrade it to a https,

We need to configure the server security group. For example, usually in the inbound rules we have HTTP:
```
IPv4        HTTP    TCP     80      0.0.0.0/0
```
We would need to delete this line, and add a new rule with https, e.g.,
```
IPv4        HTTPS   TCP     443     0.0.0.0/0
```
We should create an open SSL certificate as:
```
sudo -i
openssl genrsa -out /etc/ssl/private/apache.key 2048
openssl req -new -x509 -key /etc/ssl/private/apache.key -days 365 -sha256 -out /etc/ssl/certs/apache.crt
```
This will ask you a few questions. The only crucial part is the Common Name. Here you need to enter the public DNS name or the public IP of your AWS instance.
Then, let’s install Apache2 as:
```
apt-get install apache2
```
Then it should be configured as:
```
a2enmod
```
This will open a dialog that asks you which modules you would like to install. Type the following:
```
ssl proxy proxy_ajp proxy_http rewrite deflate headers proxy_balancer proxy_connect proxy_html
```

We need configure /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf as:

<VirtualHost *:*>
    SSLEngine on
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/apache.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/apache.key
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    ProxyPass / http://0.0.0.0:3838/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://0.0.0.0:3838/
    ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>

where 3838 is the shiny server IP (e.g., defined in /etc/shiny-server/shiny-server.conf). Note that we should not have port 80 for the shiny server.

Finally we can start aparch2 as:
```
service apache2 restart
```

Note

Sometime we may get the error AH00072: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:80. In that case, we can find which program is using 80 with sudo lsof -i:80