This weekend I learned something about HTTPS and the reasons for forcing all requests to redirect to https rather than letting requests going through unencrypted http traffic.
In a nutshell, it is about security. Https stands for “Hyper Text Transfer Protocol” with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). It essentially provides critical security and data integrity for the communications between the website and the users’ browsers. Which in turn protects users’ personal information.
In the absence of a SSL encryption, intruders can exploit unprotected communications through almost every unprotected resource such as images, cookies or scripts to trick users into giving up sensitive information and create security vulnerabilities. They may also passively listen to unprotected HTTP communications between the website and users.
Here is how you set up TLS/SSL certificate on Linux(Ubuntu).
update local apt package indexes and install the Let’s Encrypt client:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-letsencrypt-apache
