Free SSL Certificates

Blue Feather

Free, Auto-renewing SSL Certificates for FileMaker Server

This tutorial details how to set up auto-renewing free SSL certificates via Let's Encrypt.

Let’s Encrypt is a non-profit certificate authority with the mission of spreading the SSL love across the internet. We can use Let’s Encrypt to get free SSL certificates to use with FileMaker Server.

We will use a PowerShell script and the Windows Task Scheduler on Windows Server to retrieve and automatically renew SSL certificates through Let’s Encrypt to make sure our connections to FileMaker Server are secure. With this, there’s no reason anyone should have an invalid SSL certificate on their FileMaker Server deployment!

Requirements:

- FileMaker Server deployed on Windows Server – 2012 R2, 2016, or 2019 but may work with other versions.
- The “FileMaker Database Server Website” page must be reachable through the public internet using a web browser at the address you wish to get an SSL certificate for, such as http://myserver.mycompany.com. This means opening or forwarding port 80 in your router, firewall, or security groups. We use the Let’s Encrypt HTTP verification challenge, so we must make sure that Let’s Encrypt is able to reach our FileMaker server through HTTP.