Certbot Certonly Manual DNS

Certbot is a free, open-source tool that is used for automating the process of getting SSL/TLS certificates for your website. The certonly manual dns plugin is used to obtain a certificate by manually setting DNS TXT records for domain verification.

Getting Started

Before you start using Certbot certonly manual dns, you need to make sure that you have Certbot installed on your server. If you don't have it, you can install Certbot using the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install certbot python3-certbot-dns-route53

After the installation is complete, you need to specify the domain name you want to obtain a certificate for. You can use the following command to specify the domain name:

sudo certbot certonly --manual --preferred-challenges=dns --server https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory -d example.com -d www.example.com --manual-auth-hook '/path/to/authenticator-script' --manual-cleanup-hook '/path/to/cleanup-script'

The --preferred-challenges=dns option tells Certbot to use DNS verification for domain verification. The --server option tells Certbot which Let's Encrypt server to use. In this case, we are using the URL for the version 2 of the ACME API. The -d option specifies the domain name(s) for which we want to obtain a certificate. You should replace example.com with your own domain name.

The --manual-auth-hook and --manual-cleanup-hook options are used to specify scripts that are run before and after the domain verification process, respectively.

Verifying the Domain

Once you have specified the domain name and run the certonly manual dns command, Certbot will ask you to manually create a DNS TXT record for the domain name. You should log in to your DNS provider's website and create a new TXT record with the following information:

• Name: _acme-challenge.example.com (replace example.com with your own domain name)
• Value: the value provided by Certbot

Once the DNS record has been created and has propagated, you can verify the domain name by running the following command:

sudo certbot certonly --manual --preferred-challenges=dns --server https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory -d example.com -d www.example.com --manual-auth-hook '/path/to/authenticator-script' --manual-cleanup-hook '/path/to/cleanup-script'

If the domain verification is successful, Certbot will download the SSL/TLS certificate and save it to the server.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have learned how to use Certbot certonly manual dns to obtain an SSL/TLS certificate for your domain. The certonly manual dns plugin is useful when you cannot use the HTTP or HTTPS verification methods provided by Certbot. The manual DNS verification process requires additional effort, but it is a reliable method for obtaining SSL/TLS certificates.