HTTPS

TLS termination is not enabled by default. This means that the proxy listens only on port 80 after installation. If the proxy was registered with an --https option, the resulting assertion instructing client devices to connect to the proxy instead of the upstream store, is pointing those devices to use HTTPS to connect to the proxy.

This document explains how to enable and configure TLS termination in the Snap Store Proxy.

Certificate and Key

Obtain an x509 key and certificate pair for your Snap Store Proxy domain (as well as any relevant intermediate certificates if applicable). You can determine the domain by running:

snap-proxy config proxy.domain

This name will be the subject and should be one of the alternative names on the certificate as well.

How to obtain the certificate/key pair is out of scope of this document.

Importing the Key/Certificate pair

Running the below command will import the key/certificate pair (and any intermediate certificates as needed) and re-configure your Snap Store Proxy:

cat my.cert my.key [intermediate.cert ...]  | sudo snap-proxy import-certificate

For example when configuring a Let’s Encrypt issued certificate, you’d want to include the key, the certificate and intermediate certificates. Since Let’s Encrypt provides fullchain.pem that includes both the site and intermediate certificates, you can use:

cat fullchain.pem my.key | sudo snap-proxy import-certificate

After this is done, TLS termination will be enabled, and any HTTP traffic to your Snap Store Proxy will be redirected to HTTPS. This command can be re-run as needed.

Self signed certificates

The TLS certificate above may be self signed or ultimately signed by a self signed root CA that is not included in the system certificate store on your client snap devices or the snap-store-proxy host itself. If this is true, then you need to make sure that the self signed certificates in question are added to:

  • the system certificate store on the snap-store-proxy host,

  • as well as its client devices.

On classic Ubuntu machines this might be achieved by placing the certificate in question in a specific directory:

sudo cp my-selfsigned-ca.crt /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/

(make sure that the certificate file extension is .crt) then running:

sudo update-ca-certificates

If this is being done on the snap-store-proxy host, the snap-store-proxy has to be restarted:

sudo snap restart snap-store-proxy

After that, snap-store-proxy will be able to verify its status correctly.

For client machines, snapd has to be restarted:

sudo systemctl restart snapd

After that, snapd on the client device will be able to successfully verify the snap-store-proxy certificate.

A more robust method of ensuring that client devices can talk to the snap-store-proxy using a self signed certificate or one issued by a self signed root is to configure the certificate in question using snapd itself:

sudo snap set system store-certs.cert1="$(cat /path/to/my-cert-or-ca-cert.crt)"

The above method works both on classic systems as well as Ubuntu Core.

Next step

Once you’ve confirmed that your Snap Store Proxy is running and accepting HTTPS connections, you can configure client devices to use your Snap Store Proxy.

At any time, you can use:

snap-proxy status

to check the status of your Snap Store Proxy.