Support Let's Encrypt in core

[mik-jozef]

Mozilla annouced their intent to deprecate http over year and a half ago. Chrome plans to limit new features to https and mark http as non-secure. Having a https site will only get more and more important in the future and with browsers pushing https everywhere, I expect it will be essential for most Node users who who run a server.

Native Let's Encrypt support would make the complicated process of getting a certificate super easy.

[bnoordhuis]

Can you come up with a more concrete implementation proposal than "let's do it"? I'll add the feature-request label.

[mik-jozef]

When doing https.createServer(options), the options parameter could contain an array of domains and a path to store certificates. The server would check the path and if there are no certificates, it would do what certbot certonly does, using the array of domains provided to createServer(). It would also periodically do certbot renew.

I am not familiar with how letsencrypt works internally, so I cannot give any technical details. The reason I created this issue is that I am not very familiar with how https certification works and I guess most people aren't, too. Mozilla's announcement created complaints that having to obtain a certificate will be hard for small websites and if most people will need it in the future, I think it's important for this process to be simple.

[mscdex]

-1 from me, node core shouldn't be in the business of maintaining SSL certificates. That kind of thing is best left to userland.

[PaulBGD]

I disagree with this as well. I think Let's Encrypt is great, but in the end it's just regenerating certificates and that can be done with the hundreds of tools already created.

[mcollina]

I think we should put out an official guide in the docs on how to do this with libraries on userland.
This is usually an exceptionally painful process, so an "official" take on how to solve the problem would be very handy for newcomers.

[PaulBGD]

@mcollina As well we could contribute to the certbot website, which has a dropdown supporting different web servers already.
Website: https://certbot.eff.org/
GitHub: https://github.com/certbot/website

[mcollina]

@PaulBGD yes of course!

[sam-github]

Not going to happen as a feature in core, I added an issue for a guide if anyone has time to work on it: nodejs/docs#117