paullockaby / certbot

A container for running certbot.

certbot

This container lets you manage a certbot system. When the container starts it just goes into a loop that checks to every four hours see if any certificates need to be renewed. You can exec into it to run renewals manually or create new certificates.

Notes

This container prioritizes the Amazon Web Services Route 53 DNS Authenticator for performing the ACME challenge that certbot requires. You can change this by changing the FROM line in Dockerfile to match the base that you'd like to use and rebuilding the container.

Running on Docker

This container does not need to listen on any ports but it does need at least two volumes mounted.

docker build -t ghcr.io/paullockaby/certbot:latest .
docker run --rm -it -v $PWD/data:/etc/letsencrypt -v $PWD/logs:/var/log/letsencrypt ghcr.io/paullockaby/certbot:latest renew

That is, you need to mount a directory for /etc/letsencrypt and /var/log/letsencrypt. If you have renewal hooks that you want to run then you should mount /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks and then put your hooks into one of the post, pre, or deploy directories under that.

Creating a Certificate

To use this container to interact with certbot or to create a certificate, call it like this:

docker run --rm -it -v $PWD/data:/etc/letsencrypt -v $PWD/logs:/var/log/letsencrypt ghcr.io/paullockaby/certbot:latest \
    certbot certonly --test-cert --dry-run -m [e-mail] --agree-tos --no-eff-email --dns-route53 -d example.com

This will put a new certificate in place under $PWD/data. You should definitely look at setting up a post hook to then deploy that certificate somewhere. (Note that scripts in the renewal-hooks directory will not be run on a call to certonly. They only get run on calls to renew. That is to say that you should manually run any hooks that you want to run after calling certonly to create a new certificate.)

Using With Kubernetes

If you're running the renew loop on a Kubernetes cluster somewhere and you have a volume with your certificates on it, you can create a new certificate by execing into the container and telling it to create new certificates, like this:

POD=$(kubectl get pods -l service=certbot -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")
kubectl exec -it -c certbot $POD -- certbot ...

Obviously, replace the ... with the command that you wish to send to the certbot program.