acme.sh VS getssl

A self-signed certificate was generated and used by Proxmox which will always generate a warning on the browser. I did not like seeing this when trying to work on my home lab. So, I started looking for ways to put a valid SSL certificate in Proxmox. During my research, I found that Proxmox could be made to integrate with acme.sh; a free SSL certificate generator powered by ACME(Let's Encrypt).

Next, we will install acme.sh, a command-line tool for managing SSL/TLS certificates. I prefer acme.sh over certbot, as it does not depend on the OS version. For more details about acme.sh, check its GitHub repo here.

A very relevant question. Acme.sh, a similar shell script ACME client, had a remote code execution problem last year.

https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/issues/4668

As a result, any certificates issued (or renewed) after Feb 8th will not work on older Android devices (< 7.1.1), unless the ACME client has been configure to request an alternate certificate chain. The "alternate chain" workaround will also stop working on June 6th.

I need to support these older Android devices so I am looking for alternatives. I have seen ZeroSSL mentioned a few times; it is also the default CA for acme.sh (the ACME client I am using nowadays) [2]. They have a number of paid plans but ACME certificates are free [3].

I'll be testing this over the next few days, but I would also like to ask if people here have experience with ZeroSSL (good or bad :-). Any feedback would be helpful.

[1]: https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration.html

[2]: https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh

[3]: https://zerossl.com/documentation/acme/

Huh, the environment variable thing was specifically aimed at acme.sh which rather arbitrarily changed the config value from ACMEDNS_UPDATE_URL to ACMEDNS_BASE_URL, never acknowledged this in a changelog and then silently failed after an automatic upgrade as recommended by the default install:

https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/commit/2ce145f359...

It's also cleared out my .account.conf files when run on the suggested cron.

I've started using updown which also monitors my TLS certs simply because I no longer trust the process to work as documented.

It depends on your provider though. I can tell from experience that with OVH and their API, it's been easy to set up the automatic renewal via DNS verification. Apparently, the official client has support for the DNS API of 159 providers: https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/wiki/dnsapi

For the few people here that happen to run a self-hosted email server with acme.sh for TLS key/cert generation and Cloudflare for DNS management, I have made a tool that i personally use to get a perfect 100% score on Internet.nl's email test.

All of this is to say it's a decent amount of work to save the hassle of deploying certbot or acme.sh on the remote machines, pick your poison.

Here is a really solid guide for setting up the ACME DNS challenge with pretty much any DNS provider

People wonder why I like using the shell-based ACME client like dehydrated (or acme.sh):

* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=dehydrated

* https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh

Versus the official client certbot:

* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=python3-certbot

A kludgy as very long shell scripts are (thought to be), I have a better chance of being able to go through all the code and understand it than a dozen(+) Python libraries.

A 'competitor' to this would be GetSSL which is a pure-shell ACME client (plus OpenSSL and cURL) and can be executed on one host, but send verification tokens to remote systems (where you may not have cron access):

> Get certificates for remote servers - The tokens used to provide validation of domain ownership, and the certificates themselves can be automatically copied to remote servers (via ssh, sftp or ftp for tokens). The script doesn't need to run on the server itself. This can be useful if you don't have access to run such scripts on the server itself, as it's a shared server for example.

* https://github.com/srvrco/getssl

I first got by with self signed certificates, but with all the major browsers warning they'll stop supporting those eventually I finally bit the bullet last month and installed getssl to automatically update all my certificates once a month.

because I didn't want to install another package manager (snapd) on my Ubuntu 18.04 server I checked the ACME Client Implementations page and decided to try getssl, a nice little shell script that does everything I need and then some.

I just have a dedicated container that runs getssl everyday. Anything that has a web interface (Or anything that requires TLS) gets it's own conf file that gets added to the daily check. Each conf file tells getssl how to load the certificate for its particular service.

I have been using https://github.com/srvrco/getssl for years on my raspberry pi. It's a much simpler Bash script that doesn't break after every update.

i have a problem where after installing getssl (https://github.com/srvrco/getssl) to /root/.getssl i populated it's contents with bunch of SSL files using Dockerfile's COPY command. And now no matter what i do they keep reappearing.

> acme.sh

Another shell-based ACME client I like is dehyradted. But for sending certs to remote systems from one central area, perhaps the shell-based GetSSL:

> Obtain SSL certificates from the letsencrypt.org ACME server. Suitable for automating the process on remote servers.

* https://github.com/srvrco/getssl

In general, what you may want to do is configure Ansible/Puppet/etc, and have your ACME client drop the new cert in a particular area and have your configuration management system push things out from there.