Table of Contents
Certbot uses a number of different commands (also referred to as "subcommands") to request specific actions such as obtaining, renewing, or revoking certificates. The most important and commonly-used commands will be discussed throughout this document; an exhaustive list also appears near the end of the document.
The certbot
script on your web server might be named letsencrypt
if your system uses an older package, or certbot-auto
if you used an alternate installation method. Throughout the docs, whenever you see certbot
, swap in the correct name as needed.
The Certbot client supports two types of plugins for obtaining and installing certificates: authenticators and installers.
Authenticators are plugins used with the certonly
command to obtain a certificate.
The authenticator validates that you
control the domain(s) you are requesting a certificate for, obtains a certificate for the specified
domain(s), and places the certificate in the /etc/letsencrypt
directory on your
machine. The authenticator does not install the certificate (it does not edit any of your server's configuration files to serve the
obtained certificate). If you specify multiple domains to authenticate, they will
all be listed in a single certificate. To obtain multiple separate certificates
you will need to run Certbot multiple times.
Installers are Plugins used with the install
command to install a certificate.
These plugins can modify your webserver's configuration to
serve your website over HTTPS using certificates obtained by certbot.
Plugins that do both can be used with the certbot run
command, which is the default
when no command is specified. The run
subcommand can also be used to specify
a combination of distinct authenticator and installer plugins.
Plugin | Auth | Inst | Notes | Challenge types (and port) |
---|---|---|---|---|
apache | Y | Y | Automates obtaining and installing a certificate with Apache
2.4 on Debian-based distributions with
libaugeas0 1.0+. |
tls-sni-01 (443) |
webroot | Y | N | Obtains a certificate by writing to the webroot directory of
an already running webserver.
|
http-01 (80) |
nginx | Y | Y | Automates obtaining and installing a certificate with Nginx.
Shipped with Certbot 0.9.0.
|
tls-sni-01 (443) |
standalone | Y | N | Uses a "standalone" webserver to obtain a certificate.
Requires port 80 or 443 to be available. This is useful on
systems with no webserver, or when direct integration with
the local webserver is not supported or not desired.
|
http-01 (80) or tls-sni-01 (443) |
manual | Y | N | Helps you obtain a certificate by giving you instructions to
perform domain validation yourself. Additionally allows you
to specify scripts to automate the validation task in a
customized way.
|
http-01 (80), dns-01 (53) or tls-sni-01 (443) |
Under the hood, plugins use one of several ACME protocol challenges to
prove you control a domain. The options are http-01 (which uses port 80),
tls-sni-01 (port 443) and dns-01 (requiring configuration of a DNS server on
port 53, though that's often not the same machine as your webserver). A few
plugins support more than one challenge type, in which case you can choose one
with --preferred-challenges
.
There are also many third-party-plugins available. Below we describe in more detail the circumstances in which each plugin can be used, and how to use it.
The Apache plugin currently requires an OS with augeas version 1.0; currently it
supports
modern OSes based on Debian, Fedora, SUSE, Gentoo and Darwin.
This automates both obtaining and installing certificates on an Apache
webserver. To specify this plugin on the command line, simply include
--apache
.
If you're running a local webserver for which you have the ability
to modify the content being served, and you'd prefer not to stop the
webserver during the certificate issuance process, you can use the webroot
plugin to obtain a certificate by including certonly
and --webroot
on
the command line. In addition, you'll need to specify --webroot-path
or -w
with the top-level directory ("web root") containing the files
served by your webserver. For example, --webroot-path /var/www/html
or --webroot-path /usr/share/nginx/html
are two common webroot paths.
If you're getting a certificate for many domains at once, the plugin
needs to know where each domain's files are served from, which could
potentially be a separate directory for each domain. When requesting a
certificate for multiple domains, each domain will use the most recently
specified --webroot-path
. So, for instance,
certbot certonly --webroot -w /var/www/example -d www.example.com -d example.com -w /var/www/other -d other.example.net -d another.other.example.net
would obtain a single certificate for all of those names, using the
/var/www/example
webroot directory for the first two, and
/var/www/other
for the second two.
The webroot plugin works by creating a temporary file for each of your requested
domains in ${webroot-path}/.well-known/acme-challenge
. Then the Let's Encrypt
validation server makes HTTP requests to validate that the DNS for each
requested domain resolves to the server running certbot. An example request
made to your web server would look like:
66.133.109.36 - - [05/Jan/2016:20:11:24 -0500] "GET /.well-known/acme-challenge/HGr8U1IeTW4kY_Z6UIyaakzOkyQgPr_7ArlLgtZE8SX HTTP/1.1" 200 87 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Let's Encrypt validation server; +https://www.letsencrypt.org)"
Note that to use the webroot plugin, your server must be configured to serve
files from hidden directories. If /.well-known
is treated specially by
your webserver configuration, you might need to modify the configuration
to ensure that files inside /.well-known/acme-challenge
are served by
the webserver.
The Nginx plugin has been distributed with Certbot since version 0.9.0 and should
work for most configurations. We recommend backing up Nginx
configurations before using it (though you can also revert changes to
configurations with certbot --nginx rollback
). You can use it by providing
the --nginx
flag on the commandline.
certbot --nginx
Use standalone mode to obtain a certificate if you don't want to use (or don't currently have) existing server software. The standalone plugin does not rely on any other server software running on the machine where you obtain the certificate.
To obtain a certificate using a "standalone" webserver, you can use the
standalone plugin by including certonly
and --standalone
on the command line. This plugin needs to bind to port 80 or 443 in
order to perform domain validation, so you may need to stop your
existing webserver. To control which port the plugin uses, include
one of the options shown below on the command line.
--preferred-challenges http
to use port 80--preferred-challenges tls-sni
to use port 443
It must still be possible for your machine to accept inbound connections from the Internet on the specified port using each requested domain name.
Note
The --standalone-supported-challenges
option has been
deprecated since certbot
version 0.9.0.
If you'd like to obtain a certificate running certbot
on a machine
other than your target webserver or perform the steps for domain
validation yourself, you can use the manual plugin. While hidden from
the UI, you can use the plugin to obtain a certificate by specifying
certonly
and --manual
on the command line. This requires you
to copy and paste commands into another terminal session, which may
be on a different computer.
The manual plugin can use either the http
, dns
or the
tls-sni
challenge. You can use the --preferred-challenges
option
to choose the challenge of your preference.
The http
challenge will ask you to place a file with a specific name and
specific content in the /.well-known/acme-challenge/
directory directly
in the top-level directory (“web root”) containing the files served by your
webserver. In essence it's the same as the webroot plugin, but not automated.
When using the dns
challenge, certbot
will ask you to place a TXT DNS
record with specific contents under the domain name consisting of the hostname
for which you want a certificate issued, prepended by _acme-challenge
.
For example, for the domain example.com
, a zone file entry would look like:
_acme-challenge.example.com. 300 IN TXT "gfj9Xq...Rg85nM"
When using the tls-sni
challenge, certbot
will prepare a self-signed
SSL certificate for you with the challenge validation appropriately
encoded into a subjectAlternatNames entry. You will need to configure
your SSL server to present this challenge SSL certificate to the ACME
server using SNI.
Additionally you can specify scripts to prepare for validation and
perform the authentication procedure and/or clean up after it by using
the --manual-auth-hook
and --manual-cleanup-hook
flags. This is
described in more depth in the hooks section.
Sometimes you may want to specify a combination of distinct authenticator and
installer plugins. To do so, specify the authenticator plugin with
--authenticator
or -a
and the installer plugin with --installer
or
-i
.
For instance, you may want to create a certificate using the webroot plugin for authentication and the apache plugin for installation, perhaps because you use a proxy or CDN for SSL and only want to secure the connection between them and your origin server, which cannot use the tls-sni-01 challenge due to the intermediate proxy.
certbot run -a webroot -i apache -w /var/www/html -d example.com
There are also a number of third-party plugins for the client, provided by other developers. Many are beta/experimental, but some are already in widespread use:
Plugin | Auth | Inst | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
plesk | Y | Y | Integration with the Plesk web hosting tool |
haproxy | Y | Y | Integration with the HAProxy load balancer |
s3front | Y | Y | Integration with Amazon CloudFront distribution of S3 buckets |
gandi | Y | Y | Integration with Gandi's hosting products and API |
varnish | Y | N | Obtain certificates via a Varnish server |
external | Y | N | A plugin for convenient scripting (See also ticket 2782) |
icecast | N | Y | Deploy certificates to Icecast 2 streaming media servers |
pritunl | N | Y | Install certificates in pritunl distributed OpenVPN servers |
proxmox | N | Y | Install certificates in Proxmox Virtualization servers |
postfix | N | Y | STARTTLS Everywhere is becoming a Certbot Postfix/Exim plugin |
heroku | Y | Y | Integration with Heroku SSL |
If you're interested, you can also :ref:`write your own plugin <dev-plugin>`.
To view a list of the certificates Certbot knows about, run
the certificates
subcommand:
certbot certificates
This returns information in the following format:
Found the following certs: Certificate Name: example.com Domains: example.com, www.example.com Expiry Date: 2017-02-19 19:53:00+00:00 (VALID: 30 days) Certificate Path: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem Private Key Path: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem
Certificate Name
shows the name of the certificate. Pass this name
using the --cert-name
flag to specify a particular certificate for the run
,
certonly
, certificates
, renew
, and delete
commands. Example:
certbot certonly --cert-name example.com
You can use certonly
or run
subcommands to request
the creation of a single new certificate even if you already have an
existing certificate with some of the same domain names.
If a certificate is requested with run
or certonly
specifying a
certificate name that already exists, Certbot updates
the existing certificate. Otherwise a new certificate
is created and assigned the specified name.
The --force-renewal
, --duplicate
, and --expand
options
control Certbot's behavior when re-creating
a certificate with the same name as an existing certificate.
If you don't specify a requested behavior, Certbot may ask you what you intended.
--force-renewal
tells Certbot to request a new certificate
with the same domains as an existing certificate. Each domain
must be explicitly specified via -d
. If successful, this certificate
is saved alongside the earlier one and symbolic links (the "live
"
reference) will be updated to point to the new certificate. This is a
valid method of renewing a specific individual
certificate.
--duplicate
tells Certbot to create a separate, unrelated certificate
with the same domains as an existing certificate. This certificate is
saved completely separately from the prior one. Most users will not
need to issue this command in normal circumstances.
--expand
tells Certbot to update an existing certificate with a new
certificate that contains all of the old domains and one or more additional
new domains. With the --expand
option, use the -d
option to specify
all existing domains and one or more new domains.
Example:
certbot --expand -d existing.com,example.com,newdomain.com
If you prefer, you can specify the domains individually like this:
certbot --expand -d existing.com -d example.com -d newdomain.com
Consider using --cert-name
instead of --expand
, as it gives more control
over which certificate is modified and it lets you remove domains as well as adding them.
--allow-subset-of-names
tells Certbot to continue with certificate generation if
only some of the specified domain authorizations can be obtained. This may
be useful if some domains specified in a certificate no longer point at this
system.
Whenever you obtain a new certificate in any of these ways, the new certificate exists alongside any previously obtained certificates, whether or not the previous certificates have expired. The generation of a new certificate counts against several rate limits that are intended to prevent abuse of the ACME protocol, as described here.
The --cert-name
flag can also be used to modify the domains a certificate contains,
by specifying new domains using the -d
or --domains
flag. If certificate example.com
previously contained example.com
and www.example.com
, it can be modified to only
contain example.com
by specifying only example.com
with the -d
or --domains
flag. Example:
certbot certonly --cert-name example.com -d example.com
The same format can be used to expand the set of domains a certificate contains, or to replace that set entirely:
certbot certonly --cert-name example.com -d example.org,www.example.org
If your account key has been compromised or you otherwise need to revoke a certificate,
use the revoke
command to do so. Note that the revoke
command takes the certificate path
(ending in cert.pem
), not a certificate name or domain. Example:
certbot revoke --cert-path /etc/letsencrypt/live/CERTNAME/cert.pem
You can also specify the reason for revoking your certificate by using the reason
flag.
Reasons include unspecified
which is the default, as well as keycompromise
,
affiliationchanged
, superseded
, and cessationofoperation
:
certbot revoke --cert-path /etc/letsencrypt/live/CERTNAME/cert.pem --reason keycompromise
Additionally, if a certificate
is a test certificate obtained via the --staging
or --test-cert
flag, that flag must be passed to the
revoke
subcommand.
Once a certificate is revoked (or for other certificate management tasks), all of a certificate's
relevant files can be removed from the system with the delete
subcommand:
certbot delete --cert-name example.com
Note
If you don't use delete
to remove the certificate completely, it will be renewed automatically at the next renewal event.
Note
Revoking a certificate will have no effect on the rate limit imposed by the Let's Encrypt server.
Note
Let's Encrypt CA issues short-lived certificates (90 days). Make sure you renew the certificates at least once in 3 months.
As of version 0.10.0, Certbot supports a renew
action to check
all installed certificates for impending expiry and attempt to renew
them. The simplest form is simply
certbot renew
This command attempts to renew any previously-obtained certificates that
expire in less than 30 days. The same plugin and options that were used
at the time the certificate was originally issued will be used for the
renewal attempt, unless you specify other plugins or options. Unlike certonly
, renew
acts on
multiple certificates and always takes into account whether each one is near
expiry. Because of this, renew
is suitable (and designed) for automated use,
to allow your system to automatically renew each certificate when appropriate.
Since renew
only renews certificates that are near expiry it can be
run as frequently as you want - since it will usually take no action.
The renew
command includes hooks for running commands or scripts before or after a certificate is
renewed. For example, if you have a single certificate obtained using
the standalone plugin, you might need to stop the webserver
before renewing so standalone can bind to the necessary ports, and
then restart it after the plugin is finished. Example:
certbot renew --pre-hook "service nginx stop" --post-hook "service nginx start"
If a hook exits with a non-zero exit code, the error will be printed
to stderr
but renewal will be attempted anyway. A failing hook
doesn't directly cause Certbot to exit with a non-zero exit code, but
since Certbot exits with a non-zero exit code when renewals fail, a
failed hook causing renewal failures will indirectly result in a
non-zero exit code. Hooks will only be run if a certificate is due for
renewal, so you can run the above command frequently without
unnecessarily stopping your webserver.
--pre-hook
and --post-hook
hooks run before and after every renewal
attempt. If you want your hook to run only after a successful renewal, use
--deploy-hook
in a command like this.
certbot renew --deploy-hook /path/to/deploy-hook-script
For example, if you have a daemon that does not read its certificates as the root user, a deploy hook like this can copy them to the correct location and apply appropriate file permissions.
/path/to/deploy-hook-script
#!/bin/sh
set -e
for domain in $RENEWED_DOMAINS; do
case $domain in
example.com)
daemon_cert_root=/etc/some-daemon/certs
# Make sure the certificate and private key files are
# never world readable, even just for an instant while
# we're copying them into daemon_cert_root.
umask 077
cp "$RENEWED_LINEAGE/fullchain.pem" "$daemon_cert_root/$domain.cert"
cp "$RENEWED_LINEAGE/privkey.pem" "$daemon_cert_root/$domain.key"
# Apply the proper file ownership and permissions for
# the daemon to read its certificate and key.
chown some-daemon "$daemon_cert_root/$domain.cert" \
"$daemon_cert_root/$domain.key"
chmod 400 "$daemon_cert_root/$domain.cert" \
"$daemon_cert_root/$domain.key"
service some-daemon restart >/dev/null
;;
esac
done
You can also specify hooks by placing files in subdirectories of Certbot's
configuration directory. Assuming your configuration directory is
/etc/letsencrypt
, any executable files found in
/etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/pre
,
/etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy
, and
/etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/post
will be run as pre, deploy, and post
hooks respectively when any certificate is renewed with the renew
subcommand. These hooks are run in alphabetical order and are not run for other
subcommands. (The order the hooks are run is determined by the byte value of
the characters in their filenames and is not dependent on your locale.)
Hooks specified in the command line, :ref:`configuration file
<config-file>`, or :ref:`renewal configuration files <renewal-config-file>` are
run as usual after running all hooks in these directories. One minor exception
to this is if a hook specified elsewhere is simply the path to an executable
file in the hook directory of the same type (e.g. your pre-hook is the path to
an executable in /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/pre
), the file is not run a
second time. You can stop Certbot from automatically running executables found
in these directories by including --no-directory-hooks
on the command line.
More information about hooks can be found by running
certbot --help renew
.
If you're sure that this command executes successfully without human
intervention, you can add the command to crontab
(since certificates
are only renewed when they're determined to be near expiry, the command
can run on a regular basis, like every week or every day). In that case,
you are likely to want to use the -q
or --quiet
quiet flag to
silence all output except errors.
If you are manually renewing all of your certificates, the
--force-renewal
flag may be helpful; it causes the expiration time of
the certificate(s) to be ignored when considering renewal, and attempts to
renew each and every installed certificate regardless of its age. (This
form is not appropriate to run daily because each certificate will be
renewed every day, which will quickly run into the certificate authority
rate limit.)
Note that options provided to certbot renew
will apply to
every certificate for which renewal is attempted; for example,
certbot renew --rsa-key-size 4096
would try to replace every
near-expiry certificate with an equivalent certificate using a 4096-bit
RSA public key. If a certificate is successfully renewed using
specified options, those options will be saved and used for future
renewals of that certificate.
An alternative form that provides for more fine-grained control over the
renewal process (while renewing specified certificates one at a time),
is certbot certonly
with the complete set of subject domains of
a specific certificate specified via -d flags. You may also want to
include the -n
or --noninteractive
flag to prevent blocking on
user input (which is useful when running the command from cron).
certbot certonly -n -d example.com -d www.example.com
All of the domains covered by the certificate must be specified in
this case in order to renew and replace the old certificate rather
than obtaining a new one; don't forget any www. domains! Specifying
a subset of the domains creates a new, separate certificate containing
only those domains, rather than replacing the original certificate.
When run with a set of domains corresponding to an existing certificate,
the certonly
command attempts to renew that specific certificate.
Please note that the CA will send notification emails to the address you provide if you do not renew certificates that are about to expire.
Certbot is working hard to improve the renewal process, and we apologize for any inconvenience you encounter in integrating these commands into your individual environment.
Note
certbot renew
exit status will only be 1 if a renewal attempt failed.
This means certbot renew
exit status will be 0 if no certificate needs to be updated.
If you write a custom script and expect to run a command only after a certificate was actually renewed
you will need to use the --post-hook
since the exit status will be 0 both on successful renewal
and when renewal is not necessary.
When a certificate is issued, by default Certbot creates a renewal configuration file that
tracks the options that were selected when Certbot was run. This allows Certbot
to use those same options again when it comes time for renewal. These renewal
configuration files are located at /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/CERTNAME
.
For advanced certificate management tasks, it is possible to manually modify the certificate's
renewal configuration file, but this is discouraged since it can easily break Certbot's
ability to renew your certificates. If you choose to modify the renewal configuration file
we advise you to test its validity with the certbot renew --dry-run
command.
Warning
Modifying any files in /etc/letsencrypt
can damage them so Certbot can no longer properly manage its certificates, and we do not recommend doing so.
For most tasks, it is safest to limit yourself to pointing symlinks at the files there, or using
--deploy-hook
to copy / make new files based upon those files, if your operational situation requires it
(for instance, combining certificates and keys in different way, or having copies of things with different
specific permissions that are demanded by other programs).
If the contents of /etc/letsencrypt/archive/CERTNAME
are moved to a new folder, first specify
the new folder's name in the renewal configuration file, then run certbot update_symlinks
to
point the symlinks in /etc/letsencrypt/live/CERTNAME
to the new folder.
If you would like the live certificate files whose symlink location Certbot updates on each run to
reside in a different location, first move them to that location, then specify the full path of
each of the four files in the renewal configuration file. Since the symlinks are relative links,
you must follow this with an invocation of certbot update_symlinks
.
For example, say that a certificate's renewal configuration file previously contained the following directives:
archive_dir = /etc/letsencrypt/archive/example.com cert = /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/cert.pem privkey = /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem chain = /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/chain.pem fullchain = /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem
The following commands could be used to specify where these files are located:
mv /etc/letsencrypt/archive/example.com /home/user/me/certbot/example_archive sed -i 's,/etc/letsencrypt/archive/example.com,/home/user/me/certbot/example_archive,' /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/example.com.conf mv /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/*.pem /home/user/me/certbot/ sed -i 's,/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com,/home/user/me/certbot,g' /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/example.com.conf certbot update_symlinks
All generated keys and issued certificates can be found in
/etc/letsencrypt/live/$domain
. Rather than copying, please point
your (web) server configuration directly to those files (or create
symlinks). During the renewal, /etc/letsencrypt/live
is updated
with the latest necessary files.
Note
/etc/letsencrypt/archive
and /etc/letsencrypt/keys
contain all previous keys and certificates, while
/etc/letsencrypt/live
symlinks to the latest versions.
The following files are available:
privkey.pem
Private key for the certificate.
Warning
This must be kept secret at all times! Never share it with anyone, including Certbot developers. You cannot put it into a safe, however - your server still needs to access this file in order for SSL/TLS to work.
This is what Apache needs for SSLCertificateKeyFile, and Nginx for ssl_certificate_key.
fullchain.pem
All certificates, including server certificate (aka leaf certificate or end-entity certificate). The server certificate is the first one in this file, followed by any intermediates.
This is what Apache >= 2.4.8 needs for SSLCertificateFile, and what Nginx needs for ssl_certificate.
cert.pem
andchain.pem
(less common)cert.pem
contains the server certificate by itself, andchain.pem
contains the additional intermediate certificate or certificates that web browsers will need in order to validate the server certificate. If you provide one of these files to your web server, you must provide both of them, or some browsers will show "This Connection is Untrusted" errors for your site, some of the time.Apache < 2.4.8 needs these for SSLCertificateFile. and SSLCertificateChainFile, respectively.
If you're using OCSP stapling with Nginx >= 1.3.7,
chain.pem
should be provided as the ssl_trusted_certificate to validate OCSP responses.
Note
All files are PEM-encoded.
If you need other format, such as DER or PFX, then you
could convert using openssl
. You can automate that with
--deploy-hook
if you're using automatic renewal.
Certbot allows for the specification of pre and post validation hooks when run
in manual mode. The flags to specify these scripts are --manual-auth-hook
and --manual-cleanup-hook
respectively and can be used as follows:
certbot certonly --manual --manual-auth-hook /path/to/http/authenticator.sh --manual-cleanup-hook /path/to/http/cleanup.sh -d secure.example.com
This will run the authenticator.sh
script, attempt the validation, and then run
the cleanup.sh
script. Additionally certbot will pass relevant environment
variables to these scripts:
CERTBOT_DOMAIN
: The domain being authenticatedCERTBOT_VALIDATION
: The validation string (HTTP-01 and DNS-01 only)CERTBOT_TOKEN
: Resource name part of the HTTP-01 challenge (HTTP-01 only)CERTBOT_CERT_PATH
: The challenge SSL certificate (TLS-SNI-01 only)CERTBOT_KEY_PATH
: The private key associated with the aforementioned SSL certificate (TLS-SNI-01 only)CERTBOT_SNI_DOMAIN
: The SNI name for which the ACME server expects to be presented the self-signed certificate located at$CERTBOT_CERT_PATH
(TLS-SNI-01 only)
Additionally for cleanup:
CERTBOT_AUTH_OUTPUT
: Whatever the auth script wrote to stdout
Example usage for HTTP-01:
certbot certonly --manual --preferred-challenges=http --manual-auth-hook /path/to/http/authenticator.sh --manual-cleanup-hook /path/to/http/cleanup.sh -d secure.example.com
/path/to/http/authenticator.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo $CERTBOT_VALIDATION > /var/www/htdocs/.well-known/acme-challenge/$CERTBOT_TOKEN
/path/to/http/cleanup.sh
#!/bin/bash
rm -f /var/www/htdocs/.well-known/acme-challenge/$CERTBOT_TOKEN
Example usage for DNS-01 (Cloudflare API v4) (for example purposes only, do not use as-is)
certbot certonly --manual --preferred-challenges=dns --manual-auth-hook /path/to/dns/authenticator.sh --manual-cleanup-hook /path/to/dns/cleanup.sh -d secure.example.com
/path/to/dns/authenticator.sh
#!/bin/bash
# Get your API key from https://www.cloudflare.com/a/account/my-account
API_KEY="your-api-key"
EMAIL="your.email@example.com"
# Strip only the top domain to get the zone id
DOMAIN=$(expr match "$CERTBOT_DOMAIN" '.*\.\(.*\..*\)')
# Get the Cloudflare zone id
ZONE_EXTRA_PARAMS="status=active&page=1&per_page=20&order=status&direction=desc&match=all"
ZONE_ID=$(curl -s -X GET "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones?name=$DOMAIN&$ZONE_EXTRA_PARAMS" \
-H "X-Auth-Email: $EMAIL" \
-H "X-Auth-Key: $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" | python -c "import sys,json;print(json.load(sys.stdin)['result'][0]['id'])")
# Create TXT record
CREATE_DOMAIN="_acme-challenge.$CERTBOT_DOMAIN"
RECORD_ID=$(curl -s -X POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/$ZONE_ID/dns_records" \
-H "X-Auth-Email: $EMAIL" \
-H "X-Auth-Key: $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
--data '{"type":"TXT","name":"'"$CREATE_DOMAIN"'","content":"'"$CERTBOT_VALIDATION"'","ttl":120}' \
| python -c "import sys,json;print(json.load(sys.stdin)['result']['id'])")
# Save info for cleanup
if [ ! -d /tmp/CERTBOT_$CERTBOT_DOMAIN ];then
mkdir -m 0700 /tmp/CERTBOT_$CERTBOT_DOMAIN
fi
echo $ZONE_ID > /tmp/CERTBOT_$CERTBOT_DOMAIN/ZONE_ID
echo $RECORD_ID > /tmp/CERTBOT_$CERTBOT_DOMAIN/RECORD_ID
# Sleep to make sure the change has time to propagate over to DNS
sleep 25
/path/to/dns/cleanup.sh
#!/bin/bash
# Get your API key from https://www.cloudflare.com/a/account/my-account
API_KEY="your-api-key"
EMAIL="your.email@example.com"
if [ -f /tmp/CERTBOT_$CERTBOT_DOMAIN/ZONE_ID ]; then
ZONE_ID=$(cat /tmp/CERTBOT_$CERTBOT_DOMAIN/ZONE_ID)
rm -f /tmp/CERTBOT_$CERTBOT_DOMAIN/ZONE_ID
fi
if [ -f /tmp/CERTBOT_$CERTBOT_DOMAIN/RECORD_ID ]; then
RECORD_ID=$(cat /tmp/CERTBOT_$CERTBOT_DOMAIN/RECORD_ID)
rm -f /tmp/CERTBOT_$CERTBOT_DOMAIN/RECORD_ID
fi
# Remove the challenge TXT record from the zone
if [ -n "${ZONE_ID}" ]; then
if [ -n "${RECORD_ID}" ]; then
curl -s -X DELETE "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/$ZONE_ID/dns_records/$RECORD_ID" \
-H "X-Auth-Email: $EMAIL" \
-H "X-Auth-Key: $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json"
fi
fi
When processing a validation Certbot writes a number of lock files on your system to prevent multiple instances from overwriting each other's changes. This means that be default two instances of Certbot will not be able to run in parallel.
Since the directories used by Certbot are configurable, Certbot
will write a lock file for all of the directories it uses. This include Certbot's
--work-dir
, --logs-dir
, and --config-dir
. By default these are
/var/lib/letsencrypt
, /var/logs/letsencrypt
, and /etc/letsencrypt
respectively. Additionally if you are using Certbot with Apache or nginx it will
lock the configuration folder for that program, which are typically also in the
/etc
directory.
Note that these lock files will only prevent other instances of Certbot from
using those directories, not other processes. If you'd like to run multiple
instances of Certbot simultaneously you should specify different directories
as the --work-dir
, --logs-dir
, and --config-dir
for each instance
of Certbot that you would like to run.
Certbot accepts a global configuration file that applies its options to all invocations
of Certbot. Certificate specific configuration choices should be set in the .conf
files that can be found in /etc/letsencrypt/renewal
.
By default no cli.ini file is created, after creating one
it is possible to specify the location of this configuration file with
certbot-auto --config cli.ini
(or shorter -c cli.ini
). An
example configuration file is shown below:
By default, the following locations are searched:
/etc/letsencrypt/cli.ini
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/letsencrypt/cli.ini
(or~/.config/letsencrypt/cli.ini
if$XDG_CONFIG_HOME
is not set).
Since this configuration file applies to all invocations of certbot it is incorrect to list domains in it. Listing domains in cli.ini may prevent renewal from working. Additionally due to how arguments in cli.ini are parsed, options which wish to not be set should not be listed. Options set to false will instead be read as being set to true by older versions of Certbot, since they have been listed in the config file.
By default certbot stores status logs in /var/log/letsencrypt
. By default
certbot will begin rotating logs once there are 1000 logs in the log directory.
Meaning that once 1000 files are in /var/log/letsencrypt
Certbot will delete
the oldest one to make room for new logs. The number of subsequent logs can be
changed by passing the desired number to the command line flag
--max-log-backups
.
Certbot supports a lot of command line options. Here's the full list, from
certbot --help all
:
.. literalinclude:: cli-help.txt
If you're having problems, we recommend posting on the Let's Encrypt Community Forum.
You can also chat with us on IRC: (#letsencrypt @ freenode)
If you find a bug in the software, please do report it in our issue tracker. Remember to give us as much information as possible:
- copy and paste exact command line used and the output (though mind that the latter might include some personally identifiable information, including your email and domains)
- copy and paste logs from
/var/log/letsencrypt
(though mind they also might contain personally identifiable information) - copy and paste
certbot --version
output - your operating system, including specific version
- specify which installation method you've chosen