I’ve been downloading SSL certificates from my domain provider, using cat to join them together to make the fullchain.pem, uploading them to the server, and myself adding a 90 day calendar reminder. Every time I did this I’d think I should find out about this Certbot thing.
Well, I finally got around to it, and it was one of those jobs which turns out to be so easy you wish you’d done it ages ago.
The install was simple (I’m using nginx/ubuntu).
It scans up your server conf files to see which sites are being served, asks you a couple of questions, obtains the Let’s Encrypt certificate for them, installs it, updates your conf files to use it, and sets up a cron job to check if it’s time to renew the certificate, which it will also do auto-magically.
I was so pleased with it I made a donation to the EFF for it, then I started to think about how amazingly useful Let’s Encrypt is, and gave them one too. It’s just a really good time to be in this hobby.
I highly recommend Certbot. If you’ve been putting this off, or only just hearing about it, make some time for it.
Use DNS verification and wildcard certs and all this goes away.
+1
I use acme-dns and it works very well. It’s a basic DNS server that only serves the Let’s Encrypt DNS challenges - it only allows clients to create TXT records, in the exact format that Let’s Encrypt needs. This is great for security as you don’t have to give Certbot/whatever full access to your main DNS servers.
Let’s Encrypt followers CNAMEs which is how this works - you CNAME the
_acme-challengesubdomain to point to a subdomain hosted by the acme-dns server.Let’s Encrypt is fine with IPv6-only DNS servers, so I have acme-dns running on one of my VPSes only over IPv6 (since I’m using the IPv4 for my regular DNS server). Good VPS providers provide a /64 IPv6 range.
This… Is what I’ve wanted but never looked up if it was possible. Thank you. I’ve been manually renewing my cert for ages…