It is an Ansible role to generate and automate renewal for Let's Encrypt SSL certificates. It uses acme-tiny.
- Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial)
- Debian 8 (Jessie)
Let's Encrypt allows you to create free SSL certificates. They have a short half-life and must be renewed every 90 days or they will expire.
Having to manually keep track of renewals is an excellent way to forget by accident so this role will do everything for you.
Feel free to use it with any web server configuration you want. If you want a near zero configuration nginx role to go along with this role then check out my https://github.com/nickjj/ansible-nginx role.
Below is a list of default values along with a description of what they do.
---
# A list of domain names to register certificates for. This has a limit of 100.
# The first item in the list will end up being the file name, for example:
# letsencrypt_domains: ['example.com', 'www.example.com']
# The above will create example.com.pem and example.com.key files that work for
# both the root domain and the www sub-domain.
letsencrypt_domains: []
# Which web server service name needs to get restarted at the end of the run?
letsencrypt_restart_service_name: 'nginx'
# Installation paths.
letsencrypt_install_path: '/usr/local/acme-tiny'
letsencrypt_challenge_path: '/usr/share/nginx/challenges/.well-known/acme-challenge'
letsencrypt_certificate_path: '/etc/nginx/ssl'
letsencrypt_log_path: '/var/log/acme-tiny'
# Generated private keys and certificates.
letsencrypt_account_key_path: '{{ letsencrypt_install_path }}/account.key'
letsencrypt_domain_csr_path: '{{ letsencrypt_install_path }}/{{ letsencrypt_domains[0] }}.csr'
letsencrypt_valid_certificate_path: '{{ letsencrypt_install_path }}/{{ letsencrypt_domains[0] }}.crt'
# Final generated private key and certificate.
letsencrypt_domain_key_path: '{{ letsencrypt_certificate_path }}/{{ letsencrypt_domains[0] }}.key'
letsencrypt_chained_pem_path: '{{ letsencrypt_certificate_path }}/{{ letsencrypt_domains[0] }}.pem'
# Locations of the intermediate certificate used in the chain.
letsencrypt_intermediate_url: 'https://letsencrypt.org/certs/lets-encrypt-x3-cross-signed.pem'
# By default we'll use the staging server endpoint so that you're forced to
# explicitly set this when you're ready for production.
#
# For production, set this to:
# letsencrypt_default_ca: 'https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory'
letsencrypt_default_ca: 'https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory'
# How often should we try to renew certificates? Default is once per month.
letsencrypt_cron_renew: ['0', '0', '1', '*', '*']
# When set to True this will delete all private keys, CSRs and certificates.
# You would use this when you want to force create new certificates, such as
# adding a new sub-domain to your certificate file.
#
# Don't always keep this enabled or you'll likely run into rate limits.
letsencrypt_force_reset_all: False
For the sake of this example let's assume you have a group called app and
you have a typical site.yml
file.
To use this role edit your site.yml
file to look something like this:
---
- name: Configure app server(s)
hosts: app
become: True
roles:
- { role: nickjj.letsencrypt, tags: letsencrypt }
Let's say you want to generate certs for blog.example.com in production.
You can do this by opening or creating group_vars/app.yml
which is located
relative to your inventory
directory and then making it look like this:
---
letsencrypt_domains: ['blog.example.com']
letsencrypt_default_ca: 'https://acme-staging-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory'
Certificates expire in 90 days and you can issue new certificates at will so there's no way to revoke them built into this role.
If you really need to revoke them then I recommend checking out this project because it includes a way to revoke certificates and is made by the same author as acme-tiny.
$ ansible-galaxy install nickjj.letsencrypt
You can find it on the official Ansible Galaxy if you want to rate it.
MIT
Thanks to Maciej Delmanowski for helping me debug a few tricky issues with this role. He is the creator of DebOps.