Many of you already use Let’s Encrypt certificates in various capacities to provide secure connectivity to applications and devices. Most of the time, these apps and devices automatically reach out, get certs issued, installed and everything just works. That’s cases like traefik, or certbot with apache/nginx, etc.
Then there are those “other” use cases you’ve got. Like say, a custom certificate for a Plex server, or maybe even something more exotic like a certificate for an HP printer. How do you take care of those in an automated, “hands-off” sort of way? How do you make it work so that you’re not having to set reminders for yourself to get in there and swap out certs manually every 3 months? Because you know what’s going to happen right? That reminder’s going to go off, you’re going snooze it for a couple of days, then you’ll tick that checkbox, saying, “yeah, I’ll do it after I get back from lunch” and then something happens and it never gets done. Next thing you know, the cert expires, and it becomes a pain in the rear at the worst possible moment.
That’s where deploy-hooks come into play. If you’ve got a script that can install the certificate, you can call that script right after the cert has been issued by specifying the --deploy-hook flag on the certbot renew command. Let’s look at an example of how we might add this to an existing certbot certificate that’s already setup for automatic renewal. Remember, automatic renewal and automatic installation are different things.
First, we’ll do a dry-run, then we’ll force the renewal. It’s really that easy. Check it:
sudo certbot renew --cert-name printer.mynetwork.net --deploy-hook /usr/local/sbin/pcert.sh --dry-run
sudo certbot renew --cert-name printer.mynetwork.net --deploy-hook /usr/local/sbin/pcert.sh --dry-run
Once this process is completed, the automatic renewal configuration for printer.mynetwork.net will include the deploy-hook /usr/local/sbin/pcert.sh. But, what does that really mean? Upon successful renewal, that script will execute, at which point, you’re (presumably) using the script to install the newly refreshed certificate. In this case, the script is unique to that particular certificate. It’s possible to have deploy-hooks that are executed fro EVERY cert as well, by dropping them in the /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy directory.
For some examples, check out the ones I’m using. Especially interesting (to me at least) is the HP Printer script. That one took a bit of hackery to get working. I had to run the dev tools, and record the browser session a couple of times to get all the variable names straight, and so forth, but once I had it down, it was a snap. Now when the Let’s Encrypt cert updates, within a few seconds, I’ve got the latest cert installed and running on the printer!
What certs will you automate the installation of?
Automating All the Things. 