Ansible Role: Certbot (for Let's Encrypt)

Installs Certbot (for Let's Encrypt) for RHEL/CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu.

Requirements

Certbot requires Git to be installed. You can install Git using the geerlingguy.git role.

Role Variables

certbot_repo: https://github.com/certbot/certbot.git
certbot_version: master
certbot_keep_updated: yes

Certbot code repository options. This role clones the agent from the configured repo, then makes the certbot-auto script executable.

certbot_dir: /opt/certbot

The directory inside which Certbot will be cloned.

certbot_auto_renew: true
certbot_auto_renew_user: "{{ ansible_user }}"
certbot_auto_renew_hour: 3
certbot_auto_renew_minute: 30

By default, this role configures a cron job to run under the provided user account at the given hour and minute, every day. The defaults run certbot-auto renew via cron every day at 03:30:00 by the user you use in your Ansible playbook. It's preferred that you set a custom user/hour/minute so the renewal is during a low-traffic period and done by a non-root user account.

Dependencies

None.

Example Playbook

- hosts: servers

  vars:
    certbot_auto_renew_user: your_username_here
    certbot_auto_renew_minute: 20
    certbot_auto_renew_hour: 5

  roles:
    - geerlingguy.certbot

After installation, you can create certificates using the certbot-auto script, which by default is installed inside the configured certbot_dir, so by default, /opt/certbot/certbot-auto. Here are some example commands to configure certificates with Certbot:

# Automatically add certs for all Apache virtualhosts (use with caution!).
/opt/certbot/certbot-auto --apache

# Generate certs, but don't modify Apache configuration (safer).
/opt/certbot/certbot-auto --apache certonly

By default, this role adds a cron job that will renew all installed certificates once per day at the hour and minute of your choosing.

You can test the auto-renewal (without actually renewing the cert) with the command:

/opt/certbot/certbot-auto renew --dry-run

See full documentation and options on the Certbot website.

License

MIT / BSD

Author Information

This role was created in 2016 by Jeff Geerling, author of Ansible for DevOps.