Using Certbot/Let’s encrypt with Lino¶

What’s Certbot?

The recommended way to activate Certbot on a Lino server is by using the --https option of getlino configure.

This option will:

install certbot or certbot-auto (unless one of them is already installed)
add an entry to your /etc/crontab that will run certbot-auto renew automatically every 12 hours.

On a Lino server with --https option, getlino startsite will automatically do the following.

create the nginx config file in /etc/nginx/sites-available
enable the site by linking it to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
restart the nginx service
run certbot-auto to register the new site at certbot as being served on this server.

Read the docs:

Troubleshooting¶

Here are some hints for playing around manually when something doesn’t work as expected.

You can run certbot-auto at any moment in interactive mode:

$ certbot-auto
Requesting to rerun /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto with root privileges...
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log
Plugins selected: Authenticator nginx, Installer nginx

Which names would you like to activate HTTPS for?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
1: example.com
2: lists.example.com
3: www.example.com
4: emil.example.com
5: jane.example.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Select the appropriate numbers separated by commas and/or spaces, or leave input
blank to select all options shown (Enter 'c' to cancel): c

The certificates command displays information about every certificate managed by certbot:

$ certbot-auto certificates

How to remove a certbot certificate? E.g. after moving some site to a new server, you should instruct certbot on the old server to no longer ask for a certificate for that site:

$ certbot delete --certname www.example.com-0001

How to manually add a certificate for a new site on your server:

$ certbot-auto -d www.example.com

You can create certificates that cover multiple domains:

$ certbot-auto -d one.example.com -d two.example.com

How to install certbot using the Debian package:

$ sudo apt-get install certbot python-certbot-nginx
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
certbot is already the newest version (0.31.0-1).
python-certbot-nginx is already the newest version (0.31.0-1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 124 not upgraded.

Messy certificates¶

There are different ways to mess up certificates. For example you can have a certificate that covers a domain which is already covered by another certificate.

How to see all certificates that cover a given domain?

$ certbot-auto certificates | grep mydomain.org

How to see all enabled sites and the certificate they use:

$ cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
$ grep ssl_certificate_key *

How to set the email address used by the ACME server for sending notifications:

$ certbot-auto update_account --email postmaster@mydomain.org

How to delete a certificate:

$ certbot-auto delete --cert-name team.mydomain.org
Requesting to rerun /usr/local/bin/certbot-auto with root privileges...
Saving debug log to /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Deleted all files relating to certificate team.mydomain.org.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
(master) luc@lf:/usr/bin$

How to update the domain(s) covered by a certificate:

$ certbot-auto certonly -d new.mydomain.org --cert-name old.mydomain.org

One certificate covering many domains¶

The following is probably bad practice. It is easier to maintain an individual certificate for each subdomain.

On LF we have a lot of subdomains, but no wildcard certificate. Here is how to maintain the list of domains for a given certificate in a separate file.

Let’s say you have a certificate named example.com, and you have a lot of subdomains that you want to cover using that same certificate.

Create a file named ~/domains.txt with one line per domain, each line starts with -d:

-d example.com
-d www.example.com
-d sub1.example.com
...
-d sub9.example.com

You can now update this file at any moment and then run the following to updated your certificate:

$ xargs -a ~/domains.txt certbot-auto certonly --cert-name example.com