letsencrypt VS lexicon

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; } } }

One of the biggest benefits of dehydrated is that it doesn't try to integrate with a DNS provider on its own. It just calls a hook, which can be implemented with a simple shell script[1]. The most popular third-party integration is lexicon[2], though you're not required to use Lexicon. (e.g. you're free to use awscli, gcloud, linode-cli, etc. to do the actual DNS record manipulation)

This means its dependencies footprint is much smaller, and allows you to do things that can be a nightmare to configure with Certbot or other alternatives. For example, at one of the scenarios I had to set up was that we had to query a credential via HashiCorp Vault, which is then used to cURL into an API endpoint. The shell script in total was pretty short (< 100 LOC) and it worked extremely well.

[1]: https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated/blob/master/docs...

[2]: https://github.com/AnalogJ/lexicon

A reminder that if you an internal-only server where the typical http-01' verification connection method will not work, especially if you cannot easily/dynamically update DNS records, one can use dns-01* by using DNS aliasing/CNAME:

* https://dan.langille.org/2019/02/01/acme-domain-alias-mode/

* https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/technical-deep-dive-se...

So if you want a cert for www.internal.example.com, you will first have do a one-time change to have a _acme-challenge.www.internal… CNAME created to point to any other (sub-)domain where you can easily update things dynamically, e.g., www-internal.example-dnsapi.com.

When request the cert for "www.internal…", LE/ACME will look up the corresponding _acme-challenge record, and go to "_acme-challenge.www-internal.example-dnsapi.com. The nonce token will be there in the 'final' destination following the CNAME in a TXT, which shows LE/ACME that you control the DNS chain.

To do the DNS updating, you can use a CLI/Python library like Lexicon, which supports dozens of APIs:

* https://github.com/AnalogJ/lexicon

This leverages the ACME DNS server which has a REST API:

* https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns

If your DNS provider has an API, you can hook into that for internal-only web servers; this handy code supports several dozen APIs so you don't have to re-invent the wheel:

* https://github.com/AnalogJ/lexicon

* https://pypi.org/project/dns-lexicon/

* https://dns-lexicon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide.html

> It even comes preconfigured for various DNS providers[2]

Also, CLI utility that supports a bunch of APIs:

* https://github.com/AnalogJ/lexicon

Then, you can use ddclient, which supports many DNS services (including those providing DynDNS protocol), or you can write a Python script using the dns-lexicon module to manipulate the DNS records over the API.