appsmith - SSL configuration for a custom domain

Question

I followed the guide on this site to install appsmith in an Azure Container Instance:

https://docs.appsmith.com/getting-started/setup/installation-guides/azure-aci

The application runs fine under the Azure FQDN, e.g. "http://appsmith.westeurope.azurecontainer.io/".

To set up SSL i followed this guide:

https://docs.appsmith.com/getting-started/setup/instance-configuration/custom-domain

After adding the domain name to the Custom Domain setting, the app will restart and be reachable on the FQDN provided by Azure, but not on the custom domain over https.

container error log:

letsencrypt error log:

The domain name directory was created on the file share but does not contain a file.

hope someone can help.

Answer 1

I had the exact same problem.

It's a real pity that Appsmith's tutorial on deploying to Azure doesn't take these problems into consideration.

The root cause of the issue is that the file share doesn't support symlinks, something that certbot uses when applying the newly generated certificated. This issue is described here: https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/7880

What I did to make this work, was to deploy Caddy as a sidecar container, which listens to port 443 and 80.

I also had to change the port Appsmith listens to, by setting the environment variable PORT to something else, for example 5000. Some docs also mention APPSMITH_SERVER_PORT, but I don't think that one is necessary.

I used this tutorial to get Caddy up and running and forwarding the requests: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-instances/container-instances-container-group-automatic-ssl