Let’s Encrypt on Alpine Linux The Easy Way

Don’t try to use acme-client to set up a Let’s Encrypt certificate. Just go straight to certbot.

sudo apk add certbot certbot-nginx
sudo certbot --nginx

It took me…

30 minutes trying to get acme-client working on Alpine Linux because that’s what all the search results suggested using.

2 minutes looking up acme-client’s git repo and discovering that it’s no longer maintained outside of OpenBSD.

2 minutes checking whether certbot is available through APK, uninstalling acme-client, and installing certbot with the nginx plugin.

30 seconds running certbot-nginx, which automatically detected the hostname, updated the nginx config, and set up the certificate.

I like this better.