HTTPS time out for newly installed SSL certificate on Nginx

Question

Recently I bought a SSL certificate on GoDaddy and set it up in my Nginx server like this:

server {
    listen 443 ssl default_server;
    server_name www.mywebsite.example;
    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /path/to/certificates/mywebsite.example.chained.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /path/to/certificates/mywebsite.example.key;

    root /var/www/www.mywebsite.example;
    index index.html;
    location / {
            index index.html;
    }
}

I'm using the sample HTML site from Nginx. Previously I did exactly the same with port 80 (without SSL) and I was able to access the site successfully with my domain.

My Nginx server is in a EC2 instance. I made sure that the port 443 has external access and double checked it with sudo netstat -ntlp | grep LISTEN. It shows up like:

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:443             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      24561/nginx: master

Whenever I try to load https://www. mywebsite.example it results in a ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT error. I don't get anything in the Nginx error logs.

The domain is hosted in Route 53. Am I supposed to manage the DNS records in some way to support HTTPS?

Answer 1

I needed to add a rule to the Ubuntu firewall:

ufw allow 443/tcp

Maybe I have a misconception and the security groups are not the only thing that must be configured to allow external access to the EC2 instance. I didn't have to do this for another server/ssl certificate though.