Technical article

Azure Websites — Set Up HTTPS for Free

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Historical note: This post was published in 2018 and describes an older Azure App Service workflow. For a new site, prefer the platform’s current managed-certificate support.

Looking to set up HTTPS for your Azure website free of cost? It is easy thanks to Let’s Encrypt.

Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority that provides free certificates for enabling SSL/TLS. At the time, third-party implementations could automate this process for a website hosted on Azure by using an Azure site extension.

The steps were documented in the site extension’s GitHub repository. The process took about 15 minutes—not bad for free HTTPS. The extension also installed a WebJob that renewed the certificate every three months.