automated let’s encrypt ssl certificate renewal on centos 7

In my how-to for Let’s Encrypt, I gave an example script that can be called via cron (or manually) which will renew Let’s Encrypt {{SSL}} certificates under {{CentOS}} 6.

If you want to do it on {{CentOS}} 7 (which is what I am now running), use the following:

cd ~/letsencrypt
git pull
systemctl stop httpd.service
~/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto --agree-tos --keep --rsa-key-size 2048 --standalone certonly -m user@domain.tld -d domain.tld [-d sub.domain.tld [-d ...]]
systemctl start httpd.service


Now, what does this script do? Step by step:

1. clear-out the last grab of the Let’s Encrypt git repo (there’s probably a better way to do this, but I don’t know what it is)
2. go to root’s home (/root)
3. clone-down the Let’s Encrypt toolset
4. stop httpd ({{Apache}} in my case, though you might be running {{nginx}} or something else
5. run the cert tool in automated form:
   1. agree to terms of service
   2. keep current cert if it doesn’t need to be updated
   3. key size of 2048 bits
   4. run the standalone webserver to verify “ownership” of the domain
   5. generate just the cert
   6. administrative email (optional, but “encouraged”)
   7. domain(s) to issue cert for (must be individually identified with successive -d flags; LE does not support wildcard certs)
6. restart httpd

I set mine to run @weekly in cron – @monthly is likely good enough, but since it’s “free” to run, running slightly more than is necessary seems good to me. Plus, if you’re getting {{SSL}} certs for many domains all being served from the same server, they may have different expiration dates, so running more often is better.

My crontab entry for renewing certs:

@weekly /root/renew-le-ssl.sh