Am Encrypted! - Renewal ●

May 30, 2016

encryption, technology

It’s been 2 renewals & not a single issue till now. However in the mean time Let’s Encrypt guys have released a new tool to smoothen those few rough edges, namely - certbot.

And it’s cool for renewal as well. So here’s a simple rundown:

  • Get it
wget https://dl.eff.org/certbot-auto
  • Make it runnable
chmod a+x certbot-auto
  • Renew
./certbot-auto renew
  • And automate it (so that you don’t have to do it again)
> sudo crontab -e
# check twice in a day & don't forget the newline in the end
0 4 * * * ./home/ubuntu/certbot-auto renew --quiet --standalone --pre-hook "service nginx stop" --post-hook "service nginx start"
0 16 * * * ./home/ubuntu/certbot-auto renew --quiet --standalone --pre-hook "service nginx stop" --post-hook "service nginx start"

Cool thing is

certificates are only renewed when they’re determined to be near expiry

and

The hooks will only be run if a certificate is due for renewal, so you can run this command frequently without unnecessarily stopping your webserver

For more information on all the options mentioned above & more, check out this nice documentation