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.
I run all of my containerised services behind Traefik which does LetsEncrypt for me as well as handles fun stuff like routing to different containers / reverse proxy. It’s fantastic if you want to take your new knowledge to the next level!
Traefik sounds interesting. I’m old-school so I still configure Nginx manually. I’ve got a bunch of snippets in /etc/nginx/snippets/ so a lot of the configuration is just importing the right snippets.
On the other hand, there’s value in using the same software for both reverse proxies and regular websites. There’s only one configuration language to learn. I’ve been using Nginx for over 10 years so I’m very familiar with configuring it.
You know what, thanks for making this post. I have used Letsencrypt and Certbot for years now, i’d never have thought about donating, but since you said that I just made a donation.
They could hijack your site at any time, but with a copy of your live private certs they (or more likely whatever third party that will invariably breach your domain provider) can decrypt your otherwise secure traffic.
I don’t think there’s significant real tangible risk since who cares about your private selfhosted services and I’d be more worried about the domain being hijacked, and really any sort of network breach is probably interested in finding delicious credit card numbers and passwords and crypto private keys to munch on. If someone got into my network, spying on my Jellyfin streaming isn’t what I’m going to be worried about.
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-challenge subdomain 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.
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.
It’s easy* to setup Hashicorp Vault with your own CA and do automated cert generation and rotation, if you are willing to integrate everything into Vault and install your root CA everywhere. (*not really harder than any other Vault setup, but yaknow). I may go down this route eventually since I don’t think a device I don’t control has ever accessed anything I selfhost, or ever will.
I have a wildcard subdomain pointing to my public IP, and forward port 80 to an LXC container with certbot. Port 80 appears closed outside the brief window when certbot is renewing certs. Inside my network I have my PiHole configured to return the local IP for each service.
Nothing exposed to the internet at all. There is a record of my hostnames on Let’s Encrypt but not concerned if someone will, say, deduce apollo-idrac is the iDRAC service for a Dell rackmount server called apollo and the other Greek/Roman gods are VMs on it. Seemed like a house of cards that would never work reliably, but three odd years later I only have issues if a DNS resolver insists on bypassing my PiHole. And that DNS resolver is SystemD-ResolveD which should crawl back into whatever hellhole it came out of.
I also use acme.sh. It has worked great for me and was dead simple to use. Super flexible on what it can do from just renewing the certs to web server integration. Love the simple to use hooks available too.
This seems like free hate as you can use certbot without snap without any problems. Imagine stopping using Firefox because of the same reason for example
On Debian you can apt install certbot and it’s just a regular Debian package with Python files inside. Are you on Ubuntu? I know they’ve been pushing snaps for a while.
The certbot authors tried really hard at one point to make snap the only available distribution mechanism for their application and for some time the version that Fedora packaged would display some weird deprecation warning and urge you to use the snap version.
If you like certbot, you should check out Caddy. Fully auto tls so long as the server resolves to a set domain name. Caddy-docker-proxy is pure magic with docker containers.
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.
I love the docker / traefik setup we have at work. We get tls certified domains for any docker container we run with just a few lines of yml. I can spin up a site in seconds.
traefik worked for me once. Then I tried to use it again in a different and I didn’t manage to get it to run. Caddy is much simpler. Traefik is more powerful but just for Let’s Encrypt I would go with Caddy.
Wait until you stand up your own CA and issue certs with multi-year validity so they don’t have to be renewed more often than you rebuild everything anyway
At least until you try to access stuff on a Pixel phone which doesn’t let you install CA certs any more 😞
Having certificates that are valid for over a year is contra-productive, as when they get in to the wrong hands they might still be valid for a year until they naturally run out of time. The reason LetsEncrypt issues only 90d valid certificates is not to annoy you, but save your ass once someone obtains your certificates.
Exactly this. The CA/B forum (who make rules about TLS certificates that all the providers follow) are actively trying to reduce certificate validity periods. 2-3 years ago, they reduced the maximum duration for TLS certificates to 13 months. It’s likely they’ll go even lower in the future.
My understanding is that they want the entire industry to move towards a Let’s Encrypt style system where renewal is fully automated and thus there’s minimal overhead to renewing more frequently. We’re not quite there yet.
They don’t work in practice, no modern browser actively queries any revocation DBs. It’s just much more efficient to let something expire sooner than keep track of all lost somethings.
Wait until you set up cert-manager to issue both Let’s Encrypt certificates, as well as generating your own CA and issuing certs from your own CA where you can set the validity however want.
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Is it possible to change the elliptic curve yet or does it still throw suspicious errors
I run all of my containerised services behind Traefik which does LetsEncrypt for me as well as handles fun stuff like routing to different containers / reverse proxy. It’s fantastic if you want to take your new knowledge to the next level!
Traefik sounds interesting. I’m old-school so I still configure Nginx manually. I’ve got a bunch of snippets in /etc/nginx/snippets/ so a lot of the configuration is just importing the right snippets.
On the other hand, there’s value in using the same software for both reverse proxies and regular websites. There’s only one configuration language to learn. I’ve been using Nginx for over 10 years so I’m very familiar with configuring it.
Thanks, I do, and I’ve added a couple from the suggestions here. Caddy and Traefik are both on my list of things to investigate now.
Here’s my config to get you started, I’ve got a bunch of services configured to work with it on my GitLab, too!
https://gitlab.com/Matt.Jolly/traefik-grafana-prometheus-docker
You know what, thanks for making this post. I have used Letsencrypt and Certbot for years now, i’d never have thought about donating, but since you said that I just made a donation.
Good on you. For anyone else inspired, you can support Certbot here, and Let’s Encrypt here.
I promise I don’t work for them - I was just struck by how phenomenally handy they are.
Downloading certificates from your domain provider is often a security problem. Only you are supposed to know your private keys.
You’re supposed to upload the CSR, not the key.
But yeah, if they do all the generation themselves, they also have the private key and could easily break into anything the cert is used for.
Good point. Although they are also hosting my DNS, so they can take the site over anytime they want anyway?
They could hijack your site at any time, but with a copy of your live private certs they (or more likely whatever third party that will invariably breach your domain provider) can decrypt your otherwise secure traffic.
I don’t think there’s significant real tangible risk since who cares about your private selfhosted services and I’d be more worried about the domain being hijacked, and really any sort of network breach is probably interested in finding delicious credit card numbers and passwords and crypto private keys to munch on. If someone got into my network, spying on my Jellyfin streaming isn’t what I’m going to be worried about.
But it is why CSRs are used.
Thanks - I hadn’t considered the traffic decryption.
I’m obviously a fan of LE but a simple self-hosted option with a custom CA would be great for local machines:
In theory you could generate a wildcard to a domain then use 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…
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.
It’s easy* to setup Hashicorp Vault with your own CA and do automated cert generation and rotation, if you are willing to integrate everything into Vault and install your root CA everywhere. (*not really harder than any other Vault setup, but yaknow). I may go down this route eventually since I don’t think a device I don’t control has ever accessed anything I selfhost, or ever will.
I have a wildcard subdomain pointing to my public IP, and forward port 80 to an LXC container with certbot. Port 80 appears closed outside the brief window when certbot is renewing certs. Inside my network I have my PiHole configured to return the local IP for each service.
Nothing exposed to the internet at all. There is a record of my hostnames on Let’s Encrypt but not concerned if someone will, say, deduce apollo-idrac is the iDRAC service for a Dell rackmount server called apollo and the other Greek/Roman gods are VMs on it. Seemed like a house of cards that would never work reliably, but three odd years later I only have issues if a DNS resolver insists on bypassing my PiHole. And that DNS resolver is SystemD-ResolveD which should crawl back into whatever hellhole it came out of.
I highly recommend https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh
I also use acme.sh. It has worked great for me and was dead simple to use. Super flexible on what it can do from just renewing the certs to web server integration. Love the simple to use hooks available too.
Certbot has hooks too.
This is what I use because fuck snap. I used certbot to do wild card certs but once they went to snap I quit.
That’s exactly the same reason I dropped certbot, haha
If you don’t like snap, maybe you should try another distro instead (I went to fedora because I was annnoyed of snaps).
This seems like free hate as you can use certbot without snap without any problems. Imagine stopping using Firefox because of the same reason for example
On Debian you can
apt install certbotand it’s just a regular Debian package with Python files inside. Are you on Ubuntu? I know they’ve been pushing snaps for a while.The certbot authors tried really hard at one point to make snap the only available distribution mechanism for their application and for some time the version that Fedora packaged would display some weird deprecation warning and urge you to use the snap version.
Ahh… That’s weird. I’ve never tried Snap, but I think I’d use Docker before I use Snap.
If you like certbot, you should check out Caddy. Fully auto tls so long as the server resolves to a set domain name. Caddy-docker-proxy is pure magic with docker containers.
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.
I love the docker / traefik setup we have at work. We get tls certified domains for any docker container we run with just a few lines of yml. I can spin up a site in seconds.
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Wait until you find out about Caddy
Or traefik
traefik worked for me once. Then I tried to use it again in a different and I didn’t manage to get it to run. Caddy is much simpler. Traefik is more powerful but just for Let’s Encrypt I would go with Caddy.
Or swag ;)
Or Nginx Proxy Manager.
So many tools. Yet not enough time.
I took a look at Traefik once and the complexity scared me away. Caddy is my cup of tea with one simple config file.
@clb92 @Appoxo …but traefik’s autoconfigure from labels on your services in the compose file is so nice.
I don’t use compose.
Wait until you hear about mod_md
Wait till you guys use cert-manager on a kubernetes cluster
Wait until you stand up your own CA and issue certs with multi-year validity so they don’t have to be renewed more often than you rebuild everything anyway
At least until you try to access stuff on a Pixel phone which doesn’t let you install CA certs any more 😞
Having certificates that are valid for over a year is contra-productive, as when they get in to the wrong hands they might still be valid for a year until they naturally run out of time. The reason LetsEncrypt issues only 90d valid certificates is not to annoy you, but save your ass once someone obtains your certificates.
Exactly this. The CA/B forum (who make rules about TLS certificates that all the providers follow) are actively trying to reduce certificate validity periods. 2-3 years ago, they reduced the maximum duration for TLS certificates to 13 months. It’s likely they’ll go even lower in the future.
My understanding is that they want the entire industry to move towards a Let’s Encrypt style system where renewal is fully automated and thus there’s minimal overhead to renewing more frequently. We’re not quite there yet.
Which they will, because we are all bad at security.
While shorter lived certs certainly improve the general security, certificate revocation lists are what you need if a cert gets compromised.
They don’t work in practice, no modern browser actively queries any revocation DBs. It’s just much more efficient to let something expire sooner than keep track of all lost somethings.
I had no problem to install my CA on my Pixel (Android 13). I read that this was not possible for some time but Google changed it.
I’ve heard something about it changing with A14
That’s a lot of work just to avoid a renewal process that’s fully automated. Seems counter productive.
Wait until you set up cert-manager to issue both Let’s Encrypt certificates, as well as generating your own CA and issuing certs from your own CA where you can set the validity however want.
Is that something new? I can still install CA certs on my Pixel 6. It does give a scary warning, but you can just click through it.
Certbot is great when using Nginx (or Apache2), but if you can use a different engine. Its worthwhile checking out Caddy!