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.

    • @[email protected]English
      9•1 year ago

      This is what I use because fuck snap. I used certbot to do wild card certs but once they went to snap I quit.

      • @[email protected]English
        5•1 year ago

        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

      • @[email protected]English
        5•1 year ago

        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.

        • @anyhow2503English
          1•1 year ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•1 year ago

            Ahh… That’s weird. I’ve never tried Snap, but I think I’d use Docker before I use Snap.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•1 year ago

        If you don’t like snap, maybe you should try another distro instead (I went to fedora because I was annnoyed of snaps).

    • @[email protected]English
      3•1 year ago

      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.