Using the Let's Encrypt client

Welcome to the User Guide!

Table of Contents

Installation

Unless you have a very specific requirements, we kindly ask you to use the letsencrypt-auto method described below. It's the fastest, the most thourougly tested and the most reliable way of getting our software and the free SSL certificates!

letsencrypt-auto

letsencrypt-auto is a wrapper which installs some dependencies from your OS standard package repostories (e.g using apt-get or yum), and for other depencies it sets up a virtualized Python environment with packages downloaded from PyPI¹. It also provides automated updates.

Firstly, please install Git and run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt
cd letsencrypt

Warning

Alternatively you could download the ZIP archive and extract the snapshot of our repository, but it's strongly recommended to use the above method instead.

To install and run the client you just need to type:

./letsencrypt-auto

Throughout the documentation, whenever you see references to letsencrypt script/binary, you can subsitute in letsencrypt-auto. For example, to get the help you would type:

./letsencrypt-auto --help

Running with Docker

Docker is another way to quickly obtain testing certs. From the server that the domain your requesting a cert for resolves to, install Docker, issue the following command:

sudo docker run -it --rm -p 443:443 --name letsencrypt \
            -v "/etc/letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt" \
            -v "/var/lib/letsencrypt:/var/lib/letsencrypt" \
            quay.io/letsencrypt/letsencrypt:latest auth

and follow the instructions. Your new cert will be available in /etc/letsencrypt/certs.

Distro packages

Unfortunately, this is an ongoing effort. If you'd like to package Let's Encrypt client for your distribution of choice please have a look at packaging.

From source

Installation from source is only supported for developers and the whole process is described in contributing.

Warning

Please do not use python setup.py install or python pip install .. Please do not attempt the installation commands as superuser/root and/or without virtual environment, e.g. sudo python setup.py install, sudo pip install, sudo ./venv/bin/.... These modes of operation might corrupt your operating system and are not supported by the Let's Encrypt team!

Configuration file

It is possible to specify configuration file with letsencrypt-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).

Footnotes

By using this virtualized Python enviroment (virtualenv) we don't pollute the main OS space with packages from PyPI!↩︎

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