Let’s Encrypt is an SSL certificate authority managed by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). It utilizes the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) to automatically deploy free SSL certificates that are trusted by nearly all major browsers.
CautionFor most situations, the recommended method for installing Let’s Encrypt certificates is the official Certbot tool. Certbot automates the process of obtaining and installing a certificate, and can also automatically update your web server configuration. The instructions in this guide install Let’s Encrypt and add certificates manually, which is not necessary for most users.Installing a recent certbot version
For this to work, we need certbot 0.29.0 or later. Unfortunately a lot of distros ship too old versions. So we uninstall the package first (ignore any errors) and fetch the latest one.
Run the following as root:
Ubuntu
This is for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It should also work on other Ubuntu versions.
# Uninstall existing package first, just ignore any errors: apt remove certbot # Now update an install the latest certbot apt-get update apt-get install software-properties-common add-apt-repository universe add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot apt-get update apt-get install certbotDebian
apt-get remove certbot-auto cd /root wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto sudo mv certbot-auto /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto sudo chown root /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto sudo chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/certbot-autoVerifying certbot version
We need certbot 0.29.0 or newer, so double check:
# certbot --version certbot 0.31.0If this is below 0.29.0 then go back and read the previous instructions. Certbot below 0.29.0 will not work as it will screw up permissions!
Download and Install Let’s Encrypt
Install the
git
package:CentOS
sudo yum install git
Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install git
Download a clone of Let’s Encrypt from the official GitHub repository.
/opt
is a common installation directory for third-party packages, so let’s install the clone to/opt/letsencrypt
:sudo git clone https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt /opt/letsencrypt
Navigate to the new
/opt/letsencrypt
directory:cd /opt/letsencrypt
Acquire the certificate for the first time
Now you need to acquire a certificate for the first time:
certbot certonly --standalone --preferred-challenges http-01 -d irc.example.org
Naturally, replace irc.example.org with the name of your server!
Here is example output of a successful session:
When prompted, specify an administrative email address. This will allow you to regain control of a lost certificate and receive urgent security notices if necessary. Press ENTER or RETURN to save.
Agree to the Terms of Service and specify if you would like to share your email address with EFF:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please read the Terms of Service at https://letsencrypt.org/documents/LE-SA-v1.2-November-15-2017.pdf. You must agree in order to register with the ACME server at https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (A)gree/(C)ancel: a ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Would you be willing to share your email address with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a founding partner of the Let's Encrypt project and the non-profit organization that develops Certbot? We'd like to send you email about EFF and our work to encrypt the web, protect its users and defend digital rights. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Y)es/(N)o: n
If all goes well, a message similar to the one below will appear. Its appearance means Let’s Encrypt has approved and issued your certificates.
IMPORTANT NOTES: - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem Your key file has been saved at: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem Your cert will expire on 2018-05-27. To obtain a new or tweaked version of this certificate in the future, simply run letsencrypt-auto again. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run "letsencrypt-auto renew" - If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by: Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/donate Donating to EFF: https://eff.org/donate-le
Check Certificate Domains
The output of the Let’s Encrypt script shows where your certificate is stored; in this case,
/etc/letsencrypt/live
:sudo ls /etc/letsencrypt/live
example.com
All of the domains you specified above will be covered under this single certificate. This can be verified as follows:
./certbot-auto certificates
Found the following certs: Certificate Name: example.com Domains: example.com www.example.com Expiry Date: 2018-05-27 20:49:02+00:00 (VALID: 89 days) Certificate Path: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem Private Key Path: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem
Maintenance
Renew SSL Certificates
Return to the
/opt/letsencrypt
directory:cd /opt/letsencrypt
Execute the command you used in Step 1 of the Create an SSL Certificate section, adding the
--renew-by-default
parameter:sudo -H ./letsencrypt-auto certonly --standalone --renew-by-default -d example.com -d www.example.com
After a few moments, a confirmation similar to the one below should appear:
IMPORTANT NOTES: - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem Your key file has been saved at: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem Your cert will expire on 2018-05-27. To obtain a new or tweaked version of this certificate in the future, simply run letsencrypt-auto again. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run "letsencrypt-auto renew" - If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by: Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/donate Donating to EFF: https://eff.org/donate-le
Let’s Encrypt has refreshed the lifespan of your certificates; in this example, March 31st, 2016 is the new expiration date.
NoteLet’s Encrypt certificates have a 90-day lifespan. According to Let’s Encrypt, this encourages automation and minimizes damage from key compromises. You can renew your certificates at any time during their lifespan.Automatically Renew SSL Certificates (Optional)
You can also automate certificate renewal. This will prevent your certificates from expiring, and can be accomplished with
cron
.
The output of the previous command shows how to non-interactively renew all of your certificates:
./letsencrypt-auto renew
Set this task to run automatically once per month using a cron job:
sudo crontab -e
Add the following line to the end of the crontab file:
1
0 0 1 * * /opt/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto renew
Update Let’s Encrypt
Return to the
/opt/letsencrypt
directory:cd /opt/letsencrypt
Download any changes made to Let’s Encrypt since you last cloned or pulled the repository, effectively updating it:
sudo git pull
Automatically Update Let’s Encrypt (Optional)
You can also use
cron
to keep theletsencrypt-auto
client up to date.sudo crontab -e
0 0 1 * * cd /opt/letsencrypt && git pull
Self signed certificate
In case you want the easy way out and avoid all the steps above, you can create self-signed certificate by typing:
openssl req -x509 -new -newkey rsa:4096 -sha256 -days 1096 -nodes -out sisrv.pem -keyout sisrv.pem
You will need to provide some details which look like:
----- You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:US State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:New York Locality Name (eg, city) []:New York City Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:SiSrv Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:IRCd Common Name (e.g. server FQDN or YOUR name) []:irc.sisrv.net Email Address []:support@sisrv.net
This file will contain the generated cert and key, and you should move it from your current directory to tls directory
mv sisrv.pem tls/sisrv.pem
Than you should create 2 files, server.cert.pem and server.key.pem copy the certificate and the key from sisrv.pem into their own file.
Your listen block should look like:
/* Standard IRC SSL/TLS port 6697 */ listen { ip *; port 6697; options { tls; clientsonly; }; tls-options { certificate "tls/server.cert.pem"; key "tls/server.key.pem"; }; };