CertBot: Automatically enable HTTPS on your website with Let's Encrypt certs

https://certbot.eff.org/

by itherseed • 10 years ago

393 86 10 years ago

certbot.eff.org

tekism• 10 years ago

What options do IIS/Windows users have?

tssva• 10 years ago

https://github.com/ebekker/ACMESharp

zaroth• 10 years ago

In production assuming you're using HTTP validation you're going to end up routing the well-known ACME URL requests over to your ACME client. If you have a load balancer in front you can handle it there and keep IIS totally out of it. But you could also handle the route in IIS and make a back-end request to the ACME process in your code.

Once the well-known URL on your domain is setup to route to the ACME client, then you probably want a command line client (I like 'lego') scripted to run periodically and check which certs need refreshing. The last step is getting to certs back into IIS and bound to the specific site, which can be done in Powershell.

Overall it's fairly straightforward but will take hours to get it fully working and it does adds a few moving parts to your setup. I'd say not enough ROI if you need less than a dozen certs.

tacos3• 10 years ago

The Azure situation is currently a bit of a debacle. Let's Encrypt wasn't designed with particular care toward the Windows ecosystem (or PaaS providers in general), but this guy isn't helping much either.

https://github.com/sjkp/letsencrypt-siteextension

colinramsay• 10 years ago

https://github.com/Lone-Coder/letsencrypt-win-simple

skrowl• 10 years ago

I use this on my AWS EC2 boxes. Works great!

kn9• 10 years ago

http://certify.webprofusion.com

Certify is a Windows app which uses Let's Encrypt to provide free trusted SSL certificates for websites you control.

PantaloonFlames• 10 years ago

Has anyone used this on the FreeBSD servers offered by NearlyFreeSpeech.net? Tips?

aksdj• 10 years ago

I'd recommend openshift if you want free hosting.

bearbin• 10 years ago

I haven't, but there are other clients that work nearly as well. I use a modified version of letsencrypt-nosudo [1], and setup.sh should do everything you need.

[1] https://github.com/bearbin/nfsn-le

okket• 10 years ago

Previous discussion: "Announcing Certbot: EFF's Client for Let's Encrypt"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686984

therealmarv• 10 years ago

I also don't understand why this is again top in HN. The alternatives of installing certs programs in this linked article are really helpful.

manduino• 10 years ago

[Edit]: didn't read enough about it, sorry

christop• 10 years ago

Certbot is an easy-to-use automatic client that fetches and deploys SSL/TLS certificates for your webserver.

brianwawok• 10 years ago

What? It is a program that updates config files and applies for a cert. The program is a "bot"

orblivion2• 10 years ago

I am yet to try this, but I never liked the idea that it automatically edits my nginx config. Seeing that it's in Jesse Backports makes me more confident that it does something sane, though. However the Jesse instructions don't say anything about it. Is it that you get asked questions about Nginx when you say "letsencrypt certonly"? Also strange that it doesn't even seem to require sudo to run.

forgotmypassw• 10 years ago

You can use the --standalone option to get just the certificate files, so you can keep your nginx config files as-is however you configured them and just update the privkey.pem and fullchain.pem files wherever your nginx config points to look for them. And the --standalone option actually requires sudo but I guess that's because it puts the certs in /etc/letsencrypt~.

Caution though, the file paths you get after obtaining the certificates are actually relative symlinks for some reason so if you just copy these symlinks over they will most likely not point to the correct path so copy the original files instead.

orblivion2• 10 years ago

So you're saying that this debian package changes your nginx files by default? Does it warn you at least? And how does that not require sudo?

In any case, thanks for the --standalone hint.

acdha2• 10 years ago

That's how it should work but even --standalone still inspects your web server config and will refuse to run if any part of that goes wrong. For example, if you have multiple Apache VirtualHosts in the same file[1] (e.g. a port 80 redirect to the HTTPS site in the same file) any attempt to renew a certificate will fail with an error.

1. https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/1042

aprescott• 10 years ago

You don't need --standalone to get only certificate files, by the way. You can also use certonly with --webroot and it'll work just fine. The certonly is the key part.

One thing I hope they make a little clearer is how to delegate cipher suite selection to certbot. I saw some discussion about making options-ssl-nginx.conf use, say, one of Mozilla's server-side configurations (whichever one you've configured). That way you could include options-ssl-nginx.conf and it'd auto-update over time.

sschueller• 10 years ago

I still prefer this simple single file shell script: https://github.com/lukas2511/letsencrypt.sh

a_bonobo• 10 years ago

I've used this one too, can't complain, simpler setup too!

JelteF2• 10 years ago

I still like https://github.com/diafygi/acme-tiny better. It's a simple python script (300 lines) and you can understand what is going on.

ctlaltdefeat• 10 years ago

The webserver Caddy also offers similar functionality

joshstrange• 10 years ago

Eh, I wouldn't call it "similar functionality", don't get me wrong I use and quite like Caddy but that's like saying a hammer offers similar functionality to fully stocked workbench. This is a tool that only does certs, caddy does much much more.

mholt• 10 years ago

True, although Caddy is a web server, not a TLS certificate tool.

... I've got one of those up my sleeves for next year.

savrajsingh• 10 years ago

For those of us on App Engine, here's a good set of instructions: http://blog.seafuj.com/lets-encrypt-on-google-app-engine

ak2172• 10 years ago

On AWS, you can also use https://github.com/alex/letsencrypt-aws - it works great if you're using both Route 53 and ELB. It uses the dns-01 challenge, which is out-of-band - it adds a text record to your DNS instead of needing to inject content into your server. I prefer that approach.

tacos3• 10 years ago

On AWS you can get free SSL certificates from AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/certificate-manager/

ecaron• 10 years ago

Only free if you have Elastic Load Balancer running for each domain. If you're hosting a dozen micro-sites on a box, the Certificate Manager path gets a little expensive

/me looks at his February bill and remembers the lesson all too well

ak2172• 10 years ago

Unfortunately, right now ACM only works with CloudFront distributions or with ELBs in us-east-1. If you're running ELBs in another region, you can't use ACM on them.

untog• 10 years ago

Unfortunately doesn't work with AWS Lambda/API Gateway. Especially odd as Lambda has Cloudfront on the top of it, but shrug.

Unfortunately it looks as though letsencrypt-aws won't either.

wgjordan2• 10 years ago

letsencrypt-aws looks to be designed specifically to automate updating ELB certificates, and doesn't seem quite as suitable for provisioning certificates for standalone EC2 instances, for example.

I've had good results using https://github.com/sorah/acmesmith which also uses the dns-01 challenge via Route53, but saves certificates to an S3 bucket that can be fetched from any EC2 instance granted the proper permissions.

psadauskas• 10 years ago

I also wrote a tool to automate this, using Ruby. Rather than an all-in-one magic solution, it is just a set of tools intended to be easy to modify to fit in to your existing workflow/app.

https://github.com/paul/letsencrypt-route53

StavrosK3• 10 years ago

Does anyone know if the DNS challenge changes every renewal, or if I can leave it there forever and have renewals work?

ck2• 10 years ago

It's interesting OVH just notified all their webhosting customers (I assume VPS & shared hosting) they encrypted all 1.5 million account control panels via Let's Encrypt

mattferderer• 10 years ago

Has anyone tried this on a site with multiple virtual hosts? That's where I ran into my largest issues with applying the certificates.

avail2• 10 years ago

I had to apply them per-vhost when using Apache. I switched to caddy recently, which does it automatically for every vhost.

jamies888888• 10 years ago

What's caddy? I had the same problem and just ended up separating all my SSL vhosts into their own files.

33degrees• 10 years ago

You're using caddy in production? Any comments on that?

cporios• 10 years ago

I just tried it, seems to work fine.

forgueam• 10 years ago

I've read somewhere that it won't work if there are multiple VirtualHost blocks in the same file. Allegedly if you separate each vhost config into it's own file, it will start working. YMMV.

Sir_Cmpwn2• 10 years ago

I've found the best tool for getting certs from LE is this:

https://github.com/hlandau/acme

Freaky• 10 years ago

There's something I find really off-putting about a tool that's going to be managing private keys having dependencies that point to the master branch of various third party git repositories.

It also unconditionally tries to listen on ports 80, 402, 443, 552 and 4402 whenever it completes a challenge, even if you have absolutely no intention of using any of these verification methods, so there's a lot of moving parts most of which you don't want.

I made a FreeBSD port, but thought twice about submitting it: https://github.com/Freaky/ports/tree/master/security/acmetoo...

Sir_Cmpwn2• 10 years ago

Well, it's written in Go, so it's statically linked. Which helps with the whole master branch thing.

It is weird that it attempts to listen on all of those ports, though.

exratione2• 10 years ago

This example script assumes that the server has a running webserver, either Apache or Nginx. Since it doesn't use a package install for Certbot, this script should work on most Linux distributions. It installs Certbot, obtains the certificate, and sets up the cron task for renewal.

---

  #!/bin/bash
  #
  # This sets up Let's Encrypt SSL certificates and automatic renewal
  # using certbot: https://certbot.eff.org
  #
  # - Run this script as root.
  # - A webserver must be up and running.
  #
  # Certificate files are placed into subdirectories under
  # /etc/letsencrypt/live/*.
  #
  # Configuration must then be updated for the systems using the
  # certificates.
  #
  # The certbot-auto program logs to /var/log/letsencrypt.
  #

  set -o nounset
  set -o errexit

  # May or may not have HOME set, and this drops stuff into ~/.local.
  export HOME="/root"
  export
  PATH="${PATH}:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"

  # No package install yet.
  wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto
  chmod a+x certbot-auto
  mv certbot-auto /usr/local/bin

  # Install the dependencies.
  certbot-auto --noninteractive --os-packages-only

  # Set up config file.
  mkdir -p /etc/letsencrypt
  cat > /etc/letsencrypt/cli.ini <<EOF
  # Uncomment to use the staging/testing server - avoids rate limiting.
  # server = https://acme-staging.api.letsencrypt.org/directory

  # Use a 4096 bit RSA key instead of 2048.
  rsa-key-size = 4096

  # Set email and domains.
  email = admin@example.com
  domains = example.com, www.example.com

  # Text interface.
  text = True
  # No prompts.
  non-interactive = True
  # Suppress the Terms of Service agreement interaction.
  agree-tos = True

  # Use the webroot authenticator.
  authenticator = webroot
  webroot-path = /var/www/html
  EOF

  # Obtain cert.
  certbot-auto certonly

  # Set up daily cron job.
  CRON_SCRIPT="/etc/cron.daily/certbot-renew"

  cat > "${CRON_SCRIPT}" <<EOF
  #!/bin/bash
  #
  # Renew the Let's Encrypt certificate if it is time. It won't do anything if
  # not.
  #
  # This reads the standard /etc/letsencrypt/cli.ini.
  #

  # May or may not have HOME set, and this drops stuff into ~/.local.
  export HOME="/root"
  # PATH is never what you want it it to be in cron.
  export
  PATH="\${PATH}:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"

  certbot-auto --no-self-upgrade certonly

  # If the cert updated, we need to update the services using it. E.g.:
  if service --status-all | grep -Fq 'apache2'; then
     service apache2 reload
  fi
  if service --status-all | grep -Fq 'httpd'; then
     service httpd reload
  fi
  if service --status-all | grep -Fq 'nginx'; then
     service nginx reload
  fi
  EOF
  chmod a+x "${CRON_SCRIPT}"

---

nailer3• 10 years ago

Unless your whole chain is 4096 bit - which is unlikely - a 4096 bit RSA key just adds a little latency.

davidcollantes2• 10 years ago

You will not get an A+[0] without 4096.

[0] https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

tombrossman• 10 years ago

It's probably more than 'a little' latency, try:

openssl speed rsa2048 rsa4096

on your server for what is probably going to be a rude awakening. For a small, low-traffic site you might be able to manage but as traffic increases you are probably going to regret choosing 4096 bit certs unless you absolutely need them for a specific reason.

davidcollantes2• 10 years ago

Nice script, thanks!

Will this work for multiple domains? If so, is it just a matter to add them to the "domains" variable?

exratione2• 10 years ago

For multiple domains, you have to validate each one separately via the webroot method unless they are all getting served from the same webroot.

If it is all the same webroot, then yes, add them all to the domains variable.

If different webroots you might need to use the command line, which lets you run

--w /x/y/z -d example1.com --w /a/b/c -d example2.com

in one command. I'm not sure how to make that work in the configuration file, though I'm sure there's a way.

pde34• 10 years ago

A couple of suggestions based on recent (0.5.0+) Certbot features:

1. You can now do certbot certonly --post-hook "service XYZ reload" to run something if and only if certs were obtained / renewed. Or if you use the renew verb, you can use --renew-hook to get a callback for each renewed cert individually. See certbot --help renew for details.

2. You can set "quiet = True" to minimize output from the client (but see https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/2990)

wensheng• 10 years ago

Simp_le does the same thing. I use simp_le with Haproxy on one server and nginx sni on another. Works very well.

https://github.com/kuba/simp_le

finnn3• 10 years ago

No, simp_le does not do the exact same thing. simp_le will also generate certs and get them signed, but certbot will install them in apache for you. certbot is for people who don't know or care how to install a TLS cert and just want the thing to go green

pde34• 10 years ago

Certbot supports both use cases; "certonly" stops after getting the cert; "run" installs it if there's a plugin available for your webserver.

donatj• 10 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong because I really hope I'm wrong. Doesn't no question asked certificates completely undermine certificates and make man in the middle attacks remarkably simple on 'secure' sites?

I played with Caddy a little and had an SSL for a domain I already have one for without even asking for one.

Is this not a problem?

pki• 10 years ago

You already proved that you have access to it. Why is that no question asked?

Normal DV certs are either "add a CNAME, upload a uniquely named html / txt file, or click a link in an email" -- you've already done one of those (automatically in caddy)

technion• 10 years ago

What questions do you feel should be asked?

Lets Encrypt asks one question without you having to deal with it - the question where you prove you own the domain by placing a file in the webroot. This is just as much proof as the email verification you get from existing strategies. Except it involves less headache, because you aren't ordering from namecheap, then getting emails from @comodossl.com that fail SPF checks asking you to click links.

wildpeaks• 10 years ago

If, like me, you don't want it to modify your configs files for you, and don't want to turn off the webserver everytime you renew certificates, use Webroot mode.

I updated my guide to setup Nginx + Ubuntu 16.04 + Let's encrypt (Nginx, IPv6, HTTP/2, and A+ rating at SLL Labs):

https://gist.github.com/cecilemuller/a26737699a7e70a7093d4dc...

I hope it helps those that hesitate to use Let's encrypt.

JelteF2• 10 years ago

Another good method is to use https://github.com/diafygi/acme-tiny and the ciphers from https://cipherli.st

JoshTriplett• 10 years ago

I used acme-tiny to secure several domains on my server, including automated renewal via cron, running as an unprivileged user that only has access to the CSR, the ACME auth key, and the directory /.well-known/acme maps to, but not the server private key. Took about an hour to secure three domains, most of which was convincing OpenSSL to produce the right three CSRs with SubjectAltName set (to cover the "www." variants so I can securely redirect them).

pde34• 10 years ago

You can now get those instructions in concise form from the simple widget at https://certbot.eff.org.

Let us know if there are any tweaks you'd like to see made to them (or send a PR to https://github.com/certbot/website, the instructions are in _scripts/instruction-widget)

TheArcane• 10 years ago

Can this run on Raspbian 7 Apache?

yuvipanda• 10 years ago

Should be able to!

pde34• 10 years ago

Yes certbot-auto should work on Raspbian 7 but note you'll need a large swap file enabled in order for it to succeed at building the recent version of python-cryptography that it depends on:

https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/1081

This is resolved by .deb packages; they're available in jessie-backports, but I'm not sure if/when those will ever make it to Raspberry Pi land.

jradd• 10 years ago

I just recently re-created my personal wiki: https://wiki.jradd.com

using: https://github.com/JrCs/docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-compa...

This dockerfile/repo made this incredibly easy to scale with nginx/ssl/docker.

Simply add the desired domain name as environment variable when starting your container, and letsencrypt will register your cert, and re-register it at an interval.

I haven't yet tried the other methods posted in this thread, but not sure I will want to, since this was so easy.

e12e• 10 years ago

It occurred to me that this should probably be integrated with ansible for bringing up servers, and apparently I'm not the first to think so, I found a couple of project, and this one appears to fit the bill quite nicely:

https://github.com/thefinn93/ansible-letsencrypt

Must say I'm not a fan of web first, then fallback (I mean if stand-alone works, then just use that - because that should work for certs used for eg smtp, imaps etc)?

onnimonni• 10 years ago

I'm having problems using letsencrypt with domains with multiple dns A-records (round robin). What would be the standard way to issue certificates for a cluster?

CertBot: Automatically enable HTTPS on your website with Let's Encrypt certs

Related Stories