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.
Wait until you hear about mod_md
I’m obviously a fan of LE but a simple self-hosted option with a custom CA would be great for local machines:
- I don’t want every Raspberry Pi/laptop/temp VM/whatever published into the cert transparency record
- Configuring the router to forward every local hostname to the machine’s .well-known would be awful (if my ISP even allowed port 80)
- Exposing local machines to the Internet is an unnecessary degradation of security
In theory you could generate a wildcard to a domain then use it.
My use case is for domains hosted on a VPS rather than my home server-hosted stuff. None of that is exposed to the internet except via Tailnet. I’ve got a domain saved up for that but haven’t figured it out how to do it since the CA can’t access my server to verify it. I have the feeling the answer is going to be ten more commenters telling me to check out Caddy.
Yes it is, I love using cert-manager on my list cluster.
Just setup cert-manager for a client at our work thats moving to a Kubernetes cluster. Setup the ACME issuer using DNS Cloudflare challenges, its awesome how simple it is to even get internal hostnames with certs.
