certbot-pdns

Authenticator plugin for certbot (https://certbot.eff.org/).

Perform a DNS-01 challenge using TXT record in a PowerDNS (https://doc.powerdns.com/md/)

The advantages are:

• No need to configure your web server to serve challenges
• Web server not even needed
• Can generate certificate for internal hosts that are not exposed to the Internet
• A or CNAME record not even needed. Only the TXT record added by certbot-pdns matters.

Installation

Install or upgrade certbot:

pip2 install -U certbot

Install certbot-pdns:

#Install from pip
pip2 install certbot-pdns
#Install from sources
python2 setup.py install

Check that certbot-pdns:auth is listed when executing certbot --text plugins

Configuration

An example file is provided in /usr/local/etc/letsencrypt/certbot-pdns.json:

{
  "api-key": "change_it",
  "base-url": "http://127.0.0.1:34022/api/v1",
  "axfr-time": 5,
  "http-auth": ["user", "secret_pass"],
  "verify-cert": "False"
}

Configuration file must be placed in /etc/letsencrypt/certbot-pdns.json or be specified with argument certbot-pdns-config.

Configuration keys:

• api-key: Your PowerDNS API Key as specified in property api-key in file /etc/powerdns/pdns.conf
• base-url: The base URL for PowerDNS API. Require api=yes and api-readonly=no in file /etc/powerdns/pdns.conf
• axfr-time: The time in seconds to wait for AXFR in slaves. Can be set to 0 if there is only one authoritative server for the zone.

The following two keys are optional and added in case a (nginx) reverse proxy is used to secure access to the api:

• http-auth (optional): A list of two strings containing the Username and Password for a http-basic-authentication
• verify-cert (optional): defines whether the SSL-certificate provided by the reverse proxy shall be verified. Possible options are True/False or a string containing the path to a local certificate which can be used to verify the one provided by the proxy.

Usage

Use certbot as usual but specify --authenticator certbot-pdns:auth:

certbot --agree-tos --text --renew-by-default --authenticator certbot-pdns:auth certonly -d example.com -d www.example.com