Certbot is part of EFF’s effort to encrypt the entire Internet. Secure communication over the Web relies on HTTPS, which requires the use of a digital certificate that lets browsers verify the identity of web servers (e.g., is that really google.com?). Web servers obtain their certificates from trusted third parties called certificate authorities (CAs). Certbot is an easy-to-use client that fetches a certificate from Let’s Encrypt—an open certificate authority launched by the EFF, Mozilla, and others—and deploys it to a web server.
Anyone who has gone through the trouble of setting up a secure website knows what a hassle getting and maintaining a certificate is. Certbot and Let’s Encrypt can automate away the pain and let you turn on and manage HTTPS with simple commands. Using Certbot and Let's Encrypt is free, so there’s no need to arrange payment.
How you use Certbot depends on the configuration of your web server. The best way to get started is to use our root or administrator access to your web server to run Certbot.
If you’re using a hosted service and don’t have direct access to your web server, you might not be able to use Certbot. Check with your hosting provider for documentation about uploading certificates or using certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt.
Certbot is a fully-featured, extensible client for the Let's Encrypt CA (or any other CA that speaks the Contributing
If you'd like to contribute to this project please read Installation
The easiest way to install Certbot is by visiting Get Certbot.
In many cases, you can just run certbot-auto or certbot, and the
client will guide you through the process of obtaining and installing certs
interactively.
For full command line help, you can type:
./certbot-auto --help all
You can also tell it exactly what you want it to do from the command line.
For instance, if you want to obtain a cert for example.com,
www.example.com, and other.example.net, using the Apache plugin to both
obtain and install the certs, you could do this:
./certbot-auto --apache -d example.com -d www.example.com -d other.example.net
(The first time you run the command, it will make an account, and ask for an
email and agreement to the Let's Encrypt Subscriber Agreement; you can
automate those with --email and --agree-tos)
If you want to use a webserver that doesn't have full plugin support yet, you can still use "standalone" or "webroot" plugins to obtain a certificate:
./certbot-auto certonly --standalone --email admin@example.com -d example.com -d www.example.com -d other.example.net
To understand what the client is doing in detail, it's important to understand the way it uses plugins. Please see the Links
Documentation: https://github.com/certbot/certbot
Notes for developers: https://certbot.eff.org
Let's Encrypt Website: Freenode
Community: http://ietf-wg-acme.github.io/acme/
ACME working area in github: Travis CI status Documentation status System Requirements