lexicon VS dehydrated

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.

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