Ansible Role: Certbot (for Let's Encrypt)

Installs and configures Certbot (for Let's Encrypt).

Requirements

If one wants to install Certbot from upstream Git repository instead of distribution's package management, this role requires Git to be installed. You can install Git using the geerlingguy.git role.

Role Variables

The variable certbot_install_from_source controls whether to install Certbot from Git or package management. The latter is the default, so the variable defaults to no.

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 renew (or 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.

Variables Relavant for Source Installation from Git

Instead of installing Certbot from distribution's package management, installing from Git repository is also an option. This might be useful in several cases, but especially when older LTS distributions don't ship Certbot yet. These include CentOS < 7, Ubuntu < 16.10 and Debian < 8. Debian 8 includes Certbot package when packports repository is enabled.

In case source installation from Git is intended, the following variables are relevant:

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

Certbot Git repository options. This clones the configured certbot_repo, respecting the certbot_version setting. If certbot_keep_updated is set to yes, the repository is updated every time this role runs.

certbot_dir: /opt/certbot

The directory inside which Certbot will be cloned.

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 (or certbot-auto) script, which by default is installed inside the configured certbot_dir (when using Git). 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.