letsencrypt VS boulder

This seems to be not implemented in certbot, yet: https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/6566

If you do go with NPM or Traefik, under the covers it's using certbot to request/renew your certificates through Let's Encrypt using the DNS-01 challenge, meaning you can get wildcard certs and don't have to futz around with port forwards. Again I'd think Caddy has similar functionality, I just have not used it personally. Raw NGINX you probably don't want to try out yet considering it requires manually doing the configs

certbot won't be missed. The code quality is pretty poor.

https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues 5000 bugs and it most of it can be replaced by much smaller tools

Here’s a good code reference (Python and rust): https://github.com/certbot/certbot

I am trying to migrate off of Linux and back to FreeBSD, but I hit a problem today. The Let's Encrypt Certbot is not installing. A bit surprising, given how important it is. So I thought I would notify the community Here is my bug report. https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/9394

Last release: https://github.com/certbot/certbot/releases (on 28th August 2022 = 1.29.0)

Right? It’s so ridiculous how you’re supposed to use Snap to install certbot. The (well, one of..) GitHub discussion is just beyond the pale:

https://github.com/certbot/certbot/issues/8345#issuecomment-...

It goes way beyond, since Let's Encrypt influence the ecosystem a lot and the standards that are used.

If you use Let's Encrypt, you are likely using Certbot, which means that everybody uses a tool that a central authority strongly recommends to you.

I wonder how they generate the key, for example, it may be using secp256r1: https://github.com/certbot/certbot/blob/5c111d0bd1206d864d7c...

# nginx-ingress-https.conf events { } http { include mime.types; server { listen 443 ssl; listen [::]:443 ssl; server_name sg.horlick.me; ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/sg.horlick.me/fullchain.pem; ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/sg.horlick.me/privkey.pem; # taken from https://github.com/certbot/certbot/blob/master/certbot-nginx/certbot_nginx/_internal/tls_configs/options-ssl-nginx.conf ssl_session_cache shared:le_nginx_SSL:10m; ssl_session_timeout 1440m; ssl_session_tickets off; ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers off; ssl_ciphers "ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384"; ssl_dhparam /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem; sendfile on; tcp_nopush on; tcp_nodelay on; location / { proxy_pass http://host.docker.internal:9090/; proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port $server_port; } } }

There's no reason you couldn't run your own ACME server (the Let's Encrypt folk publish an open source one, boulder, but there's plenty of others). Then you can just use certbot in your VMs to manage certificates, configured to point to your CA server instead of the Let's Encrypt one.

Let's Encrypt's ACME server is open source: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder

GP's post prompted me to look into LE's ACME server implementation, Boulder [1], but it's pretty apparent that Boulder is not suitable for small scale deployments. But the smallstep "certificates" project seems to be a lot more reasonable for this use-case. Thanks for sharing, I'll definitely check it out!

[1]: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder

There's also Boulder too which supposedly is what Let's Encrypt actually runs. But, I believe you have be running Python or Docker on your Linux server, where SmallStep didn't have that requirement.

Actually it is Open Source (I'd say "Free Software" but they're the same thing). The software that makes the CA work, Boulder, is here: https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder and the end user software to get certificates which now called CertBot but was once just named "letsencrypt" is here: https://github.com/certbot/certbot

Why are you assuming that their workload includes just one query per emitted certificate?

The reality is that they are storing information during challenges, implementing rate limiting per-account, supporting OCSP validation and a few other things.

You can investigate further if you really want to see the queries that they make against the database since their software (Boulder) is open source [1]. Most queries are in the files in the "sa" (storage authority) folder.

[1] https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder/

They won't pay any licensing fees at all when their whole stack is open source. They even wrote their own CA from scratch.