community.hashi_vault VS acme-dns

My way of doing private SSL (not necessarily the easiest):

* own CA, to be distributed to all systems via Ansible playbook or Dockerfile directives

* Hashicorp Vault with enabled PKI engine

* Ansible Hashivault module [1]

* Ansible role & playbook to tie it all together

* CI enviroment for automated deployment of SSL certs to target systems

Works flawlessly once set up, including restart/reload of affected services. Might do a writeup on my personal blog at some point.

[1] https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.hashi_vault

community.hashi_vault 5.0.0 has been released. See the collection changelog for details.

community.hashi_vault version 4.2.1 has been released with updated documentation for the vault_kv2_write module. There are no functional changes.

community.hashi_vault version 4.2.0 [changelog] has been released with a new KVv2 write module and a warning/deprecation for duplicated term string option use in the hashi_vault lookup.

The community.hashi_vault collection has released version 4.1.0 with a new vault_list module and lookup from a new contributor! There are also some upcoming deprecation announcements for hvac and ansible-core support.

community.hashi_vault version 4.0.0 has been released, with previously announced breaking changes to some default values, and improvements to module documentation with attributes that describe the use of action groups and check mode support.

community.hashi_vault version 3.2.0 has been released with support for the azure auth method, thanks to new contributor @jchenship. This release also includes retries on HTTP 412 and a bugfix affecting requests>=2.28.0.

community.hashi_vault has released version 3.1.0, announcing a change to a default value that will take place in 4.0.0.

The community.hashi_vault collection is looking for feedback about support for end-of-life Python versions going forward. Join the discussion.

community.hashi_vault version 3.0.0 has been released, dropping support for Ansible 2.9 and ansible-base 2.10, as well as removing some deprecated features.

Getting a wildcard certificate from LE might be a better option, depending on how easy the extra bit of if plumbing is with your lab setup.

You need to use DNS based domain identification, and once you have a cert distribute it to all your services. The former can be automated using various common tools (look at https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns, self-hosted unless you are only securing toys you don't really care about, if you self host DNS or your registrar doesn't have useful API access) or you can leave that as an every ~ten weeks manual job, the latter involves scripts to update you various services when a new certificate is available (either pushing from where you receive the certificate or picking up from elsewhere). I have a little VM that holds the couple of wildcard certificates (renewing them via DNS01 and acmedns on a separate machine so this one is impossible to see from the outside world), it pushes the new key and certificate out to other hosts (simple SSH to copy over then restart nginx/Apache/other).

Of course you may decide that the shin if your own CA is easier than setting all this up, as you can sign long lived certificates for yourself. I prefer this because I don't need to switch to something else if I decide to give friends/others access to something.

As someone else said, it’s a huge pain to run your own dns services. However, if you want some separation, I recently saw https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns

v0.9.1 is out and natively supports both https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns and any dns provider available in https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh

I have set up an acme-dns server to answer ACME DNS Challenges: https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns

The DNS challenge can be easily automated using https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns - you do need an IP you can run a DNS server on though.

If your server is not accessible over the internet, you can still use Let's Encrypt or ZeroSSL to get a certificate. You'll just need to set up a DNS Challenge for things to work. This is a little more complicated, but can work even if your DNS provider doesn't have an API. For example, I use Google Domains and Google DNS (not cloud DNS) for my DNS server, but I've got an instance of acme-dns running on VPS box that handles the DNS auth for me. It's how every machine on my local network has valid certificates - but I annoyingly need to renew them every 90 days.

It's a bit more involved, but you can set up wildcard certificates to update automatically. Certbot has some pre-made plugins for this for several DNS providers. If yours is not on that list, there's a tool called acme-dns which is a minimal DNS server you can run on your server and delegate _acme-challenge.yourdomain.com to. If you don't want to run that on your own, you can also use the publicly hosted server/API for it.

In case you're not already familiar with it: one thing I'd recommend is using https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns to obtain the certificates. You basically just point the subdomain you need wildcard certs for at that DNS server (a one time thing, ie you don't have to do this every three months), and the related tool https://github.com/acme-dns/acme-dns-client can get the certificates in a nice, automated, way without you ever having to expose the private reverse proxy to the Internet.