Let us take a closer look at the certbot wildcard DigitalOcean and how to set it up with the support of our DigitalOcean managed services at Bobcares.

How to install a Wildcard Certbot on Digital Ocean with Let’s Encrypt?

A wildcard certificate is an SSL certificate that can protect several subdomains with a single certificate.

We might require a wildcard certificate if we need to handle several subdomains but don’t want to configure each one individually.

Let us begin the configurations by adding the Certbot repository. To add the Certbot wildcard repository type in the following command code:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot

After adding the repository we have to perform the update by typing in the following:

$ sudo apt-get update

Install a Wildcard Certificate on Digital Ocean

To install the  wildcard certbot on DigitalOcean type in the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install python-certbot-apache

After that install the DigitalOcean Certbot DNS tool by typing in the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install certbot python3-certbot-dns-digitalocean

After that Create Digital Ocean API token. Get the DO API token and save it to, ~/.secrets/certbot/digitalocean.ini, eg

# DigitalOcean API credentials used by Certbot
dns_digitalocean_token = 0000111122223333444455556666777788889999aaaabbbbccccddddeeeeffff

Create Wildcard cert for DigitalOcean

We can create the Wildcard certbot for DigitalOcean by typing in the following commands:

certbot certonly \ --dns-digitalocean \ --dns-digitalocean-credentials ~/.secrets/certbot/digitalocean.ini \ -d example.com -d *.example.com

The certificates/certs will be saved to,/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/.

Auto configure Apache single name cert

Type in the command line given below. Keep in mind that we can modify this later, but auto configure works well for appropriately configuring Apache for easy certbot wildcard digitalocean.

$ sudo certbot --apache -d example.com

The  certs will be saved to /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com-0001/.

Confirm SSL enabled

For this step we have to symlink ssl.load and ssl.conf, into the /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ folder.

Update Apache to use Wildcard cert

Open /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default-le-ssl.conf, , change the path to the SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile files. These should point to wildcard certificates.

/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/.

We can determine which certificates are the wildcards by running the code given below:

$ certbot certificates

Remove unused certificate

We can erase the useless wildcard certbot from the DigitalOcean by typing in the command line:sudo certbot remove...

Auto-renew certificate

As the certbot expires every 90 days, we will need to renew them automatically. Create a cronjob that runs every Sunday at 5:30 p.m. crontab -e

3 5 * * 0 /usr/bin/certbot renew --quiet && /usr/sbin/service apache2 restart.

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Conclusion

To conclude we have learned more about the configurations and how to set up the certbot wildcard on DigitalOcean with the support of DigitalOcean managed services.