I just finished updating my ansible-django-stack project and added tasks to automatically issue a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate and set up a cron job to auto-renew the certificate.

We're now using it for all our Shopify apps which are built in Django. Let's Encrypt certificates are only valid for 90 days, so if you have a bunch of web apps like we do and have more planned in the future, automating this process now could …

I've always hated the idea of having to pay for SSL certificates. You could always generate them yourself for free with OpenSSL and they're just as secure as the paid ones. But if you're running a public-facing website, you're pretty much stuck and have to pay for one if you don't want your visitors seeing security warnings in their browser. At least that was the case until Let's Encrypt, a free certificate authority, came …

I just spent the past hour trying to troubleshoot this error message I was getting from the requests package when communicating with the MailChimp API:

SSLError: [Errno 1] _ssl.c:510: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed

I just provisioned a production server running Ubuntu 14.04 x64 for a new Django project and had been pulling my hair out trying to figure out why it was throwing this error when our stage server works perfectly. Finally I decided to …

If you haven't tried the IPython Notebook yet, you're missing out on a very neat tool. I just started using it a few days ago myself and I regret not having used it much sooner.

I'm currently working on a new Django project where I need to use Amazon's MWS API. I find myself using the Django shell a lot to experiment with the API while building the app. While the IPython shell is quite …

I must have ran this command a hundred times by now but could never remember it:

sudo openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 3650 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout example.key -out example.crt

This will create a self-signed SSL certificate with an expiration of 10 years using a 2048-bit key. You can use this certificate with Apache2, Nginx, etc.