Let’s Encrypt – Easy – Free – Awesome

I recently saw a news article about StartCom being on Mozilla and Google’s naughty list. Things looked bad, and my StartCom certs were up for renewal on the blog.

I have seen articles flying around about Let’s Encrypt for a while now. The idea seemed awesome, but the website seemed so light on technical instructions that I didn’t know if it would actually work. I wanted to know EXACTLY what lines it would propose to hack into my carefully manicured Apache configuration. And by carefully manicured, I mean “strung together with stuff I copied and pasted from stack overflow“.

I couldn’t find the information I really wanted – so I just JUMPED in and started installing things and running commands. 30 seconds later, I had a fully functioning cert on my site. I was blown away. It copied my existing non-ssl vhost config and created a new vhost with SSL enabled. All I had to do was enter my email address, select the vhost to enabled SSL for, and hit GO.

I had to put in a crontab entry myself to get the auto-renewal to work but that wasn’t so bad. I would hope they improve that in the future – but cron is no big deal.

I’m interested to see if everything works when my web certs expire 90 days from now! Crazy times. I used to do this and dread it once per year because the process was so manual. Now that it’s automated – I’ll get new certs while I’m sleeping. Woohoo.