davidvasandani / docker-nginx-certbot

Automatically create and renew website certificates using the Let's Encrypt free certificate authority.

docker-nginx-certbot

Automatically create and renew website SSL certificates using the Let's Encrypt free certificate authority and its client certbot. Built on top of the official Nginx Docker images (both Debian and Alpine), and uses OpenSSL/LibreSSL to automatically create the Diffie-Hellman parameters used during the initial handshake of some ciphers.

ℹ️ The very first time this container is started it might take a long time before before it is ready to respond to requests. Read more about this in the Diffie-Hellman parameters section.

Acknowledgments and Thanks

This container requests SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt, with the help of their certbot script, which they provide for the absolutely bargain price of free! If you like what they do, please donate.

This repository was originally forked from @henridwyer by @staticfloat, before it was forked again by me. However, the changes to the code has since become so significant that this has now been detached as its own independent repository (while still retaining all the history). Migration instructions, from @staticfloat's image, can be found here.

Some of the more significant additions to this container:

• Handles multiple server names when requesting certificates (i.e. both example.com and www.example.com).
• Can request both RSA and ECDSA keys (at the same time).
• Will create Diffie-Hellman parameters if they are defined.
• Uses the parent container's /docker-entrypoint.d/ folder.
• Will report correct exit code when stopped/killed/failed.
• You can do a live reload of configs by sending in a SIGHUP signal (no container restart needed).
• Easy to force renewal of certificates if necessary.
• You can tune your own renewal interval.
• Both Debian and Alpine images built for multiple architectures.

Usage

Before You Start

1. This guide expects you to already own a domain which points at the correct IP address, and that you have both port 80 and 443 correctly forwarded if you are behind NAT. Otherwise I recommend DuckDNS as a Dynamic DNS provider, and then either search on how to port forward on your router or maybe find it here.

2. I suggest you read at least the first two sections in the Good to Know documentation, since this will give you some important tips on how to create a basic server config, and how to use the Let's Encrypt staging servers in order to not get rate limited.

3. I don't think it is necessary to mention if you managed to find this repository, but you will need to have Docker installed for this to function.

Available Environment Variables

Required

• CERTBOT_EMAIL: Your e-mail address. Used by Let's Encrypt to contact you in case of security issues.

Optional

• STAGING: Set to 1 to use Let's Encrypt's staging servers (default: 0)
• DHPARAM_SIZE: The size of the Diffie-Hellman parameters (default: 2048)
• RSA_KEY_SIZE: The size of the RSA encryption keys (default: 2048)
• ELLIPTIC_CURVE: The size/curve of the ECDSA keys (default: secp256r1)
• USE_ECDSA: Set to 1 to have certbot use ECDSA keys instead of RSA (default: 0)
• RENEWAL_INTERVAL: Time interval between certbot's renewal checks (default: 8d)
• DEBUG: Set to 1 to enable debug messages and use the nginx-debug binary (default: 0)

Volumes

• /etc/letsencrypt: Stores the obtained certificates and the Diffie-Hellman parameters

Run with docker run

Create your own user_conf.d/ folder and place all of you custom server config files in there. When done you can just start the container with the following command (available tags):

docker run -it -p 80:80 -p 443:443 \
           --env CERTBOT_EMAIL=[e-mail] \
           -v $(pwd)/nginx_secrets:/etc/letsencrypt \
           -v $(pwd)/user_conf.d:/etc/nginx/user_conf.d:ro \
           --name nginx-certbot jonasal/nginx-certbot:latest

You should be able to detach from the container by holding Ctrl and pressing p + q after each other.

As was mentioned in the introduction; the very first time this container is started it might take a long time before before it is ready to respond to requests, please be a little bit patient. If you change any of the config files after the container is ready, you can just send in a SIGHUP to tell my scripts and Nginx to reload everything.

docker kill --signal=HUP <container_name>

Run with docker-compose

An example of a docker-compose.yaml file can be found in the examples/ folder. The default parameters that are found inside the nginx-certbot.env file will be overwritten by any environment variables you set inside the .yaml file.

Like in the example above, you just need to place your custom server configs inside your user_conf.d/ folder beforehand. Then you start it all with the following command.

docker-compose up

Build It Yourself

This option is for if you make your own Dockerfile. Check out which tags that are available in this document, or on Docker Hub, and then choose how specific you want to be.

In this case it is possible to completely skip the user_conf.d/ folder and just write your files directly into Nginx's conf.d/ folder. This way you can replace the files I have built into the image with your own. However, if you do that please take a moment to understand what they do, and what you need to include in order for certbot to continue working.

FROM jonasal/nginx-certbot:latest
COPY conf.d/* /etc/nginx/conf.d/

More Resources

Here is a collection of links to other resources that provide useful information.

Good to Know

Document with a lot of good to know stuff about this image and the features it provides.

Changelog

Document with all the tagged versions of this repository, as well as bullet points to what has changed between the releases.