Alternative to certbot for acquiring ssl certificates to use with nginx.

CronyAkatsuki@lemmy.cronyakatsuki.xyz to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 23 points –

Hello, I wan't to ask if anyone knows of a good alternative for certbot for acquiring ssl certificates for nginx.

Certbot isn't good anymore for me since I started using crowdsec with nginx bouncer that uses lua block's inside nginx config that cerbot can't parse, making it not work anymore.

I use nginx because it's the one I know the best and for my use case work's the best. ( Hosting both program's directly on metal and docker container's )

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if you are open to learn something new: Caddy webserver has a dead simple config, fetches tls certs by default for you and works with crowdsec too

Caddy is fantastic, incredibly easy to configure and just works out of the box beautifully.

Do you have it on host or container. I'm thinking abour switching to caddy on my host and replacing nginx with it but just wan't to hear your experience with it.

I run it in its own separate VM. Normally I use containers for everything, but Caddy being the part that's most on the outside of my network, as it were, I wanted to separate off.

I'm open to using sothing like caddy or traefic, but my issue is I have a mix of packages hosted directly on system and in docker container's and as such need to proxy them all.

That's why I'm not using caddy or traefic.

Edit: rn my mix consists of about 16 diff containeraized stuff and another 4-5 not containerized stuff.

Edit2: Just now realized that they can be used on the host system's also. Would you recommend traefic or caddy?

If all was containerised, I'd recommend traefik for its impeccable container integration, but for a mix of bare metal and container services I'd go with Caddy.

I'm using Caddy (sometimes in a container or most of the time as system package) as reverse proxy mostly for containers
I try to minimize non-container services but they work well with Caddy too

Traefik is a tad more complex (still nowhere near Apache2 levels though) but scales more easily espcially if you only run containers and start/stop them programatically

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
CA (SSL) Certificate Authority
DNS Domain Name Service/System
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
nginx Popular HTTP server

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.

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You could not use the dns challenge?

Requires me to add cname record's, which beats the purpose of automation honestly. Will most likelly move to caddy.

I thought acme or certbot could handle the DNS entries with an API call to your DNS provider.

It may require another plugin though. Googling some variation of certbot acme automate DNS challenge will give you a dozen tutorials.

Certbot has no support for vultr dns, not even with plugins. Already check.

Is there a particular reason you are keeping your DNS there?

Nice ui, and I already have a vps there. My main dns provider is namecheap but made it use vultr under the hood because of the nice ui.

Being a bit pedantic, and could be wrong, but wouldn't that make Namecheap your registrar only, which registers whatever nameservers you give it for the domain you own with the relevant gTLD entity?

Fair enough, just throwing that out there as an option to move DNS somewhere that does have API access for certbot to use.

Switching to porkbun would make things a lot easier for you. DNS challenge is why I switched from Namecheap, and it's less expensive and considerably easier to administrate.

Namecheap API works just fine with Certbot DNS challenges for me, FWIW.

You don't need it to parse your config. Just set it to manual mode with a cron job. You can manually copy the certs with a short script.

I used dehydrated for a while. It's a quite simple python script iirc. It's on github someplace.

If your domain registrar is porkbun and you use their DNS hosting, they can generate wildcard certificates for you. It is pretty convenient though a little bit scary, since they generate your key pair and retrieve the cert from letsencrypt. But, since they run your DNS, they could do almost the same thing without you even knowing.

What CA are you getting your certificates from?

If Let's Encrypt, have you checked their alternative methods to certbot?