certificates VS dehydrated

You can roll your own with https://github.com/smallstep/certificates. We maintain major open source projects and contribute a lot to other projects. I don’t think that means everything we do has to be open source. Sorry this one wasn’t. Doing this in pure open source would be a book, not a blog post.

Love Let’s Encrypt — we’re sponsors — but using them for WiFi is a terrible idea. You need internal PKI for WiFi.

letsencrypt was always about moving the public internet off of http, it doesn't really make sense to use it throughout your internal network. but if you really want TLS and ACME for auto renewal, other solutions are available: https://github.com/smallstep/certificates

You could try step-ca: https://github.com/smallstep/certificates. There’s an OIDC provisioner for SSO and you can sign (short-lived) SSH certificates with it.

You could also check out out Step CA: https://github.com/smallstep/certificates and the accompanying CLI. It has an ACME server and other methods for requesting certificates. It can work/integrate with your existing root(s), too.

This is a lot more complicated setup but it works for me. I run a private CA called step-ca from smallstep and it provides CA and ACME endpoint. I use a .home domain. The trick is the validation for non-http devices which is typically the DNS-01 challenge. For this, I have unbound in pfsense setup to work with acme-dns so I can keep everything internal. Again its complicated but if your learning cyber security it might help get a handle on all things TLS. Btw way behind the scenes I think the ACME plugin is really just running acme.sh bash script which is really good. Final reminder as other have stated. Private CA is great but you need to distro the roots and intermediates out to your clients for trust. If all your trying to do is have an https web gui for pfsense from one device its pretty easy.

Just a little heads up https://smallstep.com/certificates/

Step-ca: Not web based, but the CLI is pretty user friendly: https://smallstep.com/certificates/

I was just looking at https://smallstep.com/certificates a few days ago. It looks like they have an operator that fits your description as well as example docs for setting up inter-microservice mtls.

From this commit:

https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated/commit/b116e6bc2...

I've had a lot of success with https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated . It exposes the different parts of the process (deploy challenge to DNS, deploy cert to filesystem, etc) as hooks, so it's pretty easy to integrate with anything and however you want, if you don't mind writing a bit of bash. There's a few scripts out there that use Cloudflare that you can use as well.

Depend on host's capability... - lego - dehydrated - caddy - in case it already works as a web server, it will automatically issue and renew certs

Take a look at this great project : https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated/wiki : many dns providers are documented.

> Oh, and that 500-line shell script probably ends up being a 5000-line Python monster anyway.

The dehydrated ACME client is 2400 lines of bash/zsh:

* https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated

And its external dependencies are OpenSSL and cURL. The acme.sh shell ACME client is 8000 lines of shell:

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

The official Let's Encrypt client is written in Python, and the core 'executable' is much longer, and in addition it pulls in a boatload of dependencies:

* https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/python3-certbot

Dehydrated.io, damn few dependencies.

You're welcome.

https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated

I prefer dehydrated as an ACME client because it's written in bash and the only dependencies are sed, awk, grep, and openssl. This will also leave you free to customize your nginx config as necessary without having to try to cram your needs into a generator that doesn't account for what you're trying to do. It seems odd to me that the generator would create the intermediary file (as per your quoted output above), but then not put that in the nginx config.

This project has helped us immensely with cert renewals - https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated