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Securing Apache with TLS
Nowadays, it's a great idea to ensure your organization's website is encrypted and 
available over HTTPS. Encryption of web traffic has been historically 
achieved 
by utilizing 
Secure Sockets Layer 
(
SSL
), or more recently 
Transport Layer 
Security 
(
TLS
), which is the successor to SSL. Both refer to a method of utilizing 
cryptography by installing signed certificates that protect and encrypt web traffic. 
The two functions are different, but the end result is the same. Going forward, it's 
recommended to use TLS due to the additional security strength it offers, though 
it's not uncommon to see SSL being used nowadays since it hasn't been completely 
phased out.
Setting up and benefiting from TLS is not all that difficult to do, and will help protect 
your organization against common vulnerabilities being potentially exploited. 
Utilizing TLS doesn't protect you from all exploits being used in the wild, but it 
does offer a layer of protection you'll want to benefit from. Not only that, but your 
customers pretty much expect you to secure their communications nowadays. In 
this section, we'll look at how to use TLS with our Apache installation. We'll work 
through enabling it, generating certificates, and configuring Apache to use those 
certificates with both a single site configuration and with virtual hosts.
By default, Ubuntu's Apache configuration listens for traffic on port 
80
, but not port 
443
 (HTTPS). You can check this yourself by running the following command:
sudo ss -tulpn | grep apache 
The results will look similar to the following and will show the ports that Apache is 
listening on, which is only port 
80
 by default:
tcp   LISTEN 0      511                         *:80               *:* 
 
users:(("apache2",pid=33019,fd=4),("apache2",pid=33018,fd=4),("apache2"
,pid=33017,fd=4),("apache2",pid=33016,fd=4),("apache2",pid=33015,fd=4),
("apache2",pid=33011,fd=4)) 
If the server were listening on port 
443
 as well, we would've seen the following 
within the output:
tcp   LISTEN 0      511                         *:443               *:* 
To enable support for HTTPS traffic, we need to first enable the 
ssl
 module:
sudo a2enmod ssl  
Next, we need to restart Apache:
sudo systemctl restart apache2 

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