Category Archives: Plesk

Plesk Guides, Articles and Discussion

Secure Redirects in Plesk

More and more sites are only available via https, now with the Let’s Encrypt extension available in Plesk 12.5 it’s even easier to make your site secure. As such I thought it would be a good time to write this guide.

This guide assumes…

    • You have already setup your SSL Certificate in Plesk for your domain,
    • You are using Apache (FastCGI or FPM) and Nginx is serving static files,
    • You want your site to be https only, redirecting all http requests to https
    • You have set preferred domain in Plesk to www.domain.tld

Apache

I’ll start with Apache, browse to your domain in Plesk and click on Additional Apache & Nginx settings. under Additional directives for HTTP use this redirect..

And Additional directives for HTTPS…

If you use Plesk’s built in SEO Safe redirect (preferred domain) from domain.tld to www.domain.tld, you will need to turn this off and add the following in the Additional HTTPS directives…

Nginx

Now onto the Nginx directives…

Notice I’m using $scheme rather than the more common $host, as using the $host rewrite affected ssllabs scores in that domain.tld and www.domain.tld would score differently after adding HPKP and HSTS headers in Apache.

I hope that helps someone.

Updated to reflect changes at: https://hstspreload.org/

Add DHParam to Plesk Panel

You can fix Logjam for the Plesk Panel by simply adding the standard Nginx dhparam directive to the plesk.conf file.
Very similar to previous posts on adding OCSP and HSTS to Plesk.

First you will need to create your dhparam, you can follow my guide Creating DH Parameters, and then locate the file and edit with your favourite editor…

And add the Nginx ssl_dhparam directive above the certificate entries like so…

Save the file and restart the Plesk server…

And you are good to go.
I hope that helps someone.

Secure Plesk Webmail

Here’s how I install SSL certificates for Horde and Roundcube bundled with Plesk 12.0.18 to remove chain issues, and keep the certificate in scope of Plesk backups.

INSTALL

Firstly, install your webmail certificate in…

And then go to…

Get the file names for the webmail certificate and CA certificate and make a custom horde and roundcube template (paths to follow) adding the following directives.

THE DIRECTIVES

Apache files (horde.php and roundcube.php)

Nginx File (nginxWebmailPartial.php)

I do this because the CA directives are missing from the default Apache2 templates.

TEMPLATE LOCATION

Templates are located here..

copy the above files to

and then edit the files..

EDITING THE TEMPLATES

You need to find and replace the SSL directive/s in the template files and replace with the ones above.

horde.php line 83, and roundcube.php line 86

become…

nginxWebmailPartial.php, there’s a big chunk you need to remove, lines 10 to 26 (in your file)…

Becomes something like…

You can see I have also added ssl_session_cache in there along with HSTS, OCSP, dhparam and ECDH Curve.
Now regenerate the conf files with…

Your webmail will now be properly secured and you won’t get any chain issues when testing your site at ssllabs.

Please note CentOS paths are different. The psa folder is located in /usr/local/.

Thanks for reading, I am working on formatting this article better so you can copy and paste directives like previous guides, unfortunately the code tags wouldn’t wrap the above php sections.