Let's Encrypt with DirectAdmin

raymii

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Nov 7, 2015
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I've written a guide on getting Let's Encrypt working with DirectAdmin. It features the full setup guide for the Let's Encrypt client and a small guide to setup a website via DirectAdmin with this certificate. For now it only works if you have root access, so not for shared hosting. But, many of you run DirectAdmin on a VPS with root.

The software is in Beta still, and the tutorial is written for the beta. When it's out of beta, I'll adapt the tutorial. If the DirectAdmin staff ever decides to integrate Let's Encrypt (by default for every website), I'll also update the instructions.

Check it out: https://raymii.org/s/articles/Lets_Encrypt_Directadmin.html

Tips, comments and improvements are welcome!
 
Hi raymii,

Nice tutorial you have made. I'm hoping that the DirectAdmin staff can create a feature to automate this.
This will be a nice feature that a lot of user will like.
The only thing is that the hosting providers can't make any money with certificates anymore.
But that can be an advantage of the people who want to make sure that all their costumers are secure!

Keep up the good work! I will use it when Let's encrypt will be out of beta in about two weeks!

With kind regards,

Robin
 
Thank you Robin.

Let's poke John so that this will become a featurre request. If DirectAdmin would auto enable let's encrypt by default it would make a big part of the web so much more secure. cPanel has deals with certificate providers as seen in their wizards, DirectAdmin doesn't seem to have that.

Also, certificate providers still make money from EV certificates. DV certificates are a large part of the quantity, but not a lot of the overall revenue. Source? I've worked at an SSL certificate authority as a sysadmin. DV Only works if your scale is big enough and only the 4 big players have that (Comodo, Thawte, Symantec). The +400 other certificate providers are smaller and probably make more from 1 EV cert than from a few hundred DV certs.
 
I've written a guide on getting Let's Encrypt working with DirectAdmin. It features the full setup guide for the Let's Encrypt client and a small guide to setup a website via DirectAdmin with this certificate. For now it only works if you have root access, so not for shared hosting. But, many of you run DirectAdmin on a VPS with root.

Thank you! Great tutorial.
 
Nice work. I think a good DA implementation would involve the manual option, I don't think disabling apache for even a small amount of time is a good idea. Placing a dir/file into a users public_html seems easy enough to me.

The renewal will always be the same procedure as I understand it, since the certs will always expire after 90 days. If you got the installation procedure automated I suppose you can just run that nearing the end of the valid date. I think they mean that their tool will do this for you in the future, but on DA that tool probably isn't an option.
 
Thanks! I've successfully encrypted 4 of my domains using this method now.

I've not dealt much with SSL certs on Directadmin. Are they saved to some location that we can use to automate adding and updating the certs using a script? Having to update these individually every 90 will be very time consuming at scale.
 
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