dehydrated VS acme-dns-server

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

DNS alias mode:

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

* https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/wiki/DNS-alias-mo...

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

You want the name "internal.example.com". In your external DNS you create a CNAME from "_acme-challenge.internal.example.com" and point it to (e.g.) "internal.example.net" or "internal.dns-auth.example.com"

When you request the certificate you specify the "dns-01" method. The issuer (e.g., LE) will go to the the external DNS server for the look up, see that it is a CNAME and then follow the CNAME/alias, and do the verification at the final hostname.

So your ACME client has to do a DNS (TXT) record update, which can often be done via various APIs, e.g.:

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

You can even run your own DNS server locally (in a DMZ?) if your DNS provider does not have an convenient API. There are servers written for this use case:

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

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

* https://github.com/pawitp/acme-dns-server

I already had Bind on the machine so it was logical to add the zone there and utilize nsupdate : https://gist.github.com/kronthto/893715f12cc0b1cda9fcfdbd8dc...

But what you are suggesting should work just fine aswell - there should be no need for a persistent service. Of course the service would need to run on port 53, so you actually cannot have another nameserver on that machine already, and also require CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE .

A quick search lead me to this python project that could be an inspiration: https://github.com/pawitp/acme-dns-server