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 thoroughly 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 repositories (e.g using apt-get or yum), and for other dependencies 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 substitute 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 the packaging.

From source

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

Plugins

Officially supported plugins:

Plugin	A	I	Notes and status
standalone	Y	N	Very stable. Uses port 80 (force by `--standalone-supported-challenges simpleHttp`) or 443 (force by `standalone-supported-challenges dvsni`).
webroot	Y	N	Works with already running webserver, by writing necessary files to the disk (`--webroot-path` should be pointed to your `public_html`). Currently, when multiple domains are specified (-d), they must all use the same web root path.
manual	Y	N	Hidden from standard UI, use with `--a manual`. Requires to copy and paste commands into a new terminal session. Allows to run client on machine different than target webserver, e.g. your laptop.
apache	Y	Y	Alpha - might break stuff, so be careful. Support for Debian-derived distros only.
nginx	Y	Y	Very experimental. Not included in letsencrypt-auto.

Third party plugins are listed at https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt/wiki/Plugins. If that that's not enough, you can always write your own plugin <dev-plugin>.

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).

Getting help

If you're having problems you can chat with us on IRC (#letsencrypt @ Freenode) or get support on our forums.

If you find a bug in the software, please do report it in our issue tracker. Remember to give us us as much information as possible:

copy and paste exact command line used and the output (though mind that the latter might include some personally identifiable information, including your email and domains)
copy and paste logs from /var/log/letsencrypt (though mind they also might contain personally identifiable information)
copy and paste letsencrypt --version output
your operating system, including specific version
specify which installation method you've chosen

Footnotes

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

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