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Add Https to Azure Web App with Let's Encrypt

You have deployed a web app docker container to Azure Web App service. Now you want to enable Https for the web application. This article will show you, how you can manage that from a Windows operating system. The creation and addition in this case will be manual. The certificate will be created with the help of Let’s Encrypt. To transform the certificate into the right format for Azure, OpenSSL will be used.

Note: If you do not have a custom domain name, you should consider the Certificate service from Azure. This is a free service, it creates a Digicert certificate and it also renews it automatically. It comes with limitations though.

To create a Let’s Encrypt certificate, first, you should download the Certbot program from their site. The windows version is still in beta, but it works nonetheless. You can get it from here or check out their site for instructions on how to install it here.

After installing the Cerbot you should be able to call certbot commands from cmd or powershell.

Issuing a certificate

The following command needs to be executed to create a certificate:

certbot certonly -d testDomain.com -d www.testDomain.com --manual --preferred-challenges dns

• certonly - only creates a certificate, does not install it on the machine
• -d - domain name specifier, you can add multiple domains, subdomains for a certificate
• –preferred-challenges dns - defines how you prove that the domain is under your administration. In this case with a DNS challenge. A DNS challenge requires you to add a DNS TXT record on your domain.

If you use the DNS Zones service from Azure, you should add a new Record like this.

After the DNS challenge is successfully made, you should have a message, that is successfully created the certificate. For the default installation the path where the certificate was exported is C:\Certbot\archive.

The following files should be there:

• cert.pem
• chain.pem
• fullchain.pem
• privkey.pem

Converting the certificate for Azure

Azure requires a private certificate in the PKCS#12 file format. Certbot does not generate it out of the box, but we can convert it to the right format with OpenSSL.

For a pfx certificate this command needs to be run: with the files from the previous step.

openssl pkcs12 -export -out certificate.pfx -inkey privkey.pem -in cert.pem -certfile chain.pem

Note: You will have to give a password in this process, this password will be used later when we upload the certificate.

Uploading certificate to Azure Web App service

Open App Service from the Azure Web portal. From the left navigation of your app, select TLS/SSL settings > Private Key Certificates (.pfx) > Upload Certificate. Then add binding to the Custom Domain under the Custom Domain section.

More on this, in the official documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/configure-ssl-certificate#upload-certificate-to-app-service

Add Git Bash To Visual Studio Top Bar

There are numerous times when the Visual Studio built-in Git operations are not enough to handle the task you need to solve. Often the best way to use git is from the Git Bash. That is why you should add it to the Visual Studio top menu bar. This way the git bash will open in the correct place ready to execute your commands.

The following steps will guide you to achieve this:

From the menu bar select Tools -> External Tools…

Add a new External Tool. Give the path to your local Git bash installation and select $(SolutionDir) as the Initial directory. This way it will always open up in the currently opened solution directory.

Then go to View -> Toolbars -> Customize…

Once the window opened select the Commands tab and click Add Command…

Choose from the Tool the new External Command, the number may depend on the defined external commands.

After adding it to the Preview. Select it and move it down to the end.

That’s it! You should now have the option to open git bash directly from Visual Studio.

Creating a Wix Installer Patch from MSI

Creating patches for minor upgrades can be a real pain. The documentation for MsiMps.exe/PatchWiz.dll or WiX patching is missing a lot of detail and the error messages the tools give back are not enough. The responses and fixes are scattered on the internet or on the WiX mailing lists.

Jekyll Tag Generator for Github Pages

Long Qian has a great blog post about how to put tags on Github pages. While following the steps suggested by him, I saw, that the tag_generator script was written in python. Since I did not have a python compiler installed on my windows machine, I thought it should be easy to convert to a Powershell script.

Add Separator Line In System Tray Context-Menu Programatically

When creating a ContextMenu programatically, this class only accepts MenuItem items. Adding a Separator ( < Separator /> ) as one would do in XAML does not work. To add a separator line is actually quite easy, but you have to know to create a MenuItem with the parameter ”-“ as string.